T-Mobile has been busy promoting its 5G network, recently spending many additional billions to expand it, which makes it type strange that he was also caught telling users to turn off the 5G to save battery (via Sascha Segan) Did Verizon not make that same gaffe a few days ago? Of course. But instead of learning from the example, T-Mobile seems to have stopped: where Verizon told users to switch to LTE, many of T-Mobile’s supporting documents tell users to go all the way back to 2G.
In case you didn’t know, switching to 2G (which T-Mobile 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 around 1 Mbps (although many come close to 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 average bandwidth speeds that T-Mobile has boasted.
(It doesn’t matter that T-Mobile is also in the middle of eliminating 2G signals for good, although the 2G shutdown has been postponed to 2022.)
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T-Mobile probably realized that this type of advice was not a great look, but the company’s cover-up has also been incredibly slow. Earlier today, he removed the warning “Switch from 5G / LTE to 2G” from 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 also didn’t take long to find the 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 turning off 4G, not 5G). It’s probably an incomplete list, but you get the idea: the little push to choose T-Mobile’s slow 2G network has come up several times.
(This is a Google Cache version of T-Mobile’s first support page from March 1.)
I will say that T-Mobile is right in one respect: lowering my phone to 2G would probably make it so slow that I would simply give up trying to use it, and my phone would probably last much longer. If you’re struggling with your phone’s battery life, there are many things you can try that don’t involve hitting the brake too hard.