T-Mobile saw Verizon telling people to turn off 5G and thought ‘why stop there’

T-Mobile has been busy peddling its 5G network, recently spending several billions more to expand it, making it sort of annoying that it was also caught telling users to turn off 5G to save battery power (via Sascha Segan). Didn’t Verizon make the same mistake just a few days ago? That is true. But instead of learning from the example, T-Mobile seems to have pulled a break: where Verizon has told users to switch to LTE, many T-Mobile support documents are telling users to go. all the way back to 2G.

In case you didn’t know, switching to 2G (which T-Mobile easily tells you how to do) will make your phone almost useless as a data device: the theoretical maximum speed you could get with a 2G connection would be of about 1 Mbps. (although many reach over 256 Kbps). Even 1 Mbps is 25 times slower than what the FTC considers acceptable broadband speeds, and 300 times slower than the average 5G mid-band speeds that T-Mobile has bragged about.

(Never mind that T-Mobile is also phasing out 2G signals for real, although the shutdown of 2G would have been postponed to 2022.)

Screenshot: The Verge

T-Mobile probably realized that this sort of advice didn’t look very good, but the company’s cover-up was amusingly slow, too. Earlier today, he removed the “Switch from 5G / LTE to 2G” advice from the first Example PC Magazine found (the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G), and the second (the Samsung Galaxy S21 5G) had its support page updated shortly before we wrote these words. It didn’t take long to find advice to turn off 5G and / or 4G on the pages of the LG Wing, OnePlus Nord N10 5G, Galaxy S20 + 5G, and Pixel 4a 5G (which strangely only mentions the deactivation of 4G, not 5G). It’s probably an incomplete list, but you see the picture: T-Mobile’s sluggish 2G network picking nudge showed a bunch of it.

(Here’s a Google Cache version of the first T-Mobile support page from March 1.)

I will say T-Mobile is right in a way: reducing my phone to 2G would probably slow it down so much that I would give up trying to use it, and my phone would probably last a lot longer. If you have issues with your phone’s battery life, there are a lot of things you can try that don’t involve slamming the brakes so hard.