While T-Mobile technically acquired Sprint almost nine months ago with the ultimate goal of shutting down the “Now Network” and migrating as many customers as possible to the country’s leading “Un-carrier”, this transition from two wireless service providers to a great force. to take into account has always been a long and rather complicated process.
For what it’s worth, the perennial venture appears to be moving at a relatively slow but certainly orderly pace, as T-Mo plans to enable CDMA-only devices and devices that do not have VoLTE support in Sprint’s legacy network did not, all to stop in January. 1, 2021, according to a recent letter allegedly received by a “valued business customer”.
It’s barely four days away at the time of this writing, who feels extremely short notice for something that seems so important, but that only relates to new activations, that exist Sprint subscribers actually have nothing to worry about … yet.
Then they will have time “on or around January 1, 2022” to keep all CDMA devices and dual CDMA / LTE devices without Voice over LTE features in use. This is because Magenta plans to end the archaic Sprint CDMA network about a year from now, which seems to be more or less in line with the general schedule that CEO Mike Sievert shared just a few weeks back.
Sievert describes his company’s 2020 Sprint-killing movements as mostly ‘isolated’ business, and predicts that efforts will hardly start ‘seriously’ at some point in 2022. Clearly, a closure of the CDMA network sounds like a big and ‘serious’ step towards burial. Sprint’s name and technology are completely hereafter to merge its brand with that of T-Mobile for marketing purposes and the combination of the two’s 5G resources for, well, Verizon and AT&T crushing purposes.
While January 1, 2022 is not exactly around the corner, it’s probably a good idea to upgrade or replace your outdated “equipment” as soon as possible. Something tells us Within the next 12 months, T-Mobile will roll out a number of sweet offers specifically aimed at making your transition from a CDMA to a 5G-enabled device as smooth and inexpensive as possible. So keep an eye out for such stuff too.