This week AT&T confirmed that it would be shutting down 2G by 1st January 2017. Story here if you're interested. This is no big surprise. They've been moving in the direction of sunsetting for a while now, for instance only effectively accepting 3G devices for M2M. Our view is well known. We think AT&T will lose out in M2M as a result of having no 2G. Don't get me wrong, the future of M2M is 3G, but there is a solid chunk of it that doesn't need high bandwidth and AT&T will lose out to its customers there. For this reason we dinged AT&T in our M2M Leaderboard back in March. That said, we don't necessarily think it's a bad idea for AT&T as a whole. Network rationalisation is necessary and if the savings are greater than the lost revenue (or greater costs to support the same devices on 3G) then AT&T as a whole is up. I'd be very surprised if that weren't the case. So in M2M terms this means a reduced market share for AT&T but it's good news for the overall health of the company.
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