The end of 2G: what is being switched off right now, and what to check in your fleet

Switching off 2G is no longer a distant deadline: it is under way. According to the calendars published by the operators and relayed by industry summaries, Orange began shutting down in departmental waves in the autumn of 2026, SFR is targeting the second half of November for the densest areas, and Bouygues Telecom has announced a shutdown from mid-November, generalized in early December. 3G will follow later: end of 2028 for Orange and SFR, end of 2029 for Bouygues Telecom.

Exact dates change and differ between operators: the reference for a given site is the announcement from the operator whose SIM is installed, not a general calendar.

Why this concerns objects more than phones

Recent handsets fall back to 4G or 5G on their own. The problem is elsewhere: in equipment installed five, ten or fifteen years ago, sized to send a few kilobytes a day and never replaced since. According to figures cited by the French authorities, around two million SIM cards were still, in spring 2026, sitting in 2G-only equipment — with several million more depending on 2G or 3G.

The most exposed families of equipment are well known:

• Alarm and remote-monitoring systems, whose backup transmission often runs over a GSM module.
• Lift emergency telephones, which are subject to a regulatory duty of permanent voice connection.
• Meters and concentrators (water, gas, heat, electrical sub-metering).
• Trackers and telematics boxes on vehicles and machinery.
• Remote controllers and stations in industrial or agricultural settings, and isolated payment terminals.

A four-column inventory

The difficulty is not technical, it is documentary: many operators do not know what they have. A four-column table is enough to start:

• Where: site, room, equipment reference.
• What: model, year, communication module if known.
• Which SIM: operator, subscription type, and above all the technologies actually supported by the module — a "4G" module is not necessarily LTE-M or VoLTE capable.
• How critical: what concretely happens if the link drops? A missed alert, an estimated bill, or a person stuck in a lift do not carry the same urgency.

Two sources let you build this inventory without visiting every site: the list of SIM cards billed by the operator, and the logs of the monitoring platform, which show which devices are still communicating and how often.

Choosing the replacement technology

There is no single replacement for 2G, but a family of answers depending on the use case:

• LTE-M: modest throughput, good indoor penetration, mobility and, depending on the configuration, voice support. The default choice for most cellular devices.
• NB-IoT: very low power, very good basement coverage, but high latency and limited mobility. Suited to fixed meters, not to trackers.
• Standard 4G / 5G: for anything that needs throughput (cameras, gateways aggregating several sensors, interactive terminals).
• LoRaWAN or private sub-GHz: relevant when the fleet is dense on one site or territory and you accept running your own network.
• Wired, fibre or Wi-Fi: often the best solution where it already exists, and the cheapest to operate.

The choice rests on four criteria: data volume, expected battery life, mobility and latency constraint. It is the same logic as the one described in our article on where to place intelligence between sensor, gateway and cloud — deciding locally reduces the need for throughput, and therefore widens the choice of technology.

Three common traps

• Replacing like for like. A cellular module chosen today will be in service for ten years. Checking that it covers LTE-M and NB-IoT, and that it can receive remote updates, costs little and avoids the next forced migration.
• Forgetting voice. A lift emergency telephone needs a voice channel: on 4G that means VoLTE, which is not a given on every module or every machine-to-machine subscription.
• Neglecting the security of the new fleet. Replaced equipment is new equipment, subject to today's requirements: per-device keys, signed updates, and now data access by design. See our articles on OT security and on the Data Act.

Our reading

This shutdown is a constraint, but it is also the first chance in a long time to regain control of a fleet built up by sedimentation. An inventory done now serves twice: for the migration under way, and for the end of 3G, which will arrive two or three years earlier than most operators imagine.

Sources

• French Directorate-General for Enterprise — Closure of the 2G and 3G mobile networks
• Ariase — End of 2G and 3G: dates by operator
• Échos du Net — 2G/3G shutdown calendar by operator