The largest European economy has serious coverage issues, and not just in isolated areas but also in large cities such as Berlin and Munich. A study found that mobile networks run at speeds slower than in Albania
All German providers had it shut down by 2021, Denmark by 2023, so best explanation that I have is that some 4G stuff got reported as 3G by your phone, the terminology isn’t unified and in particular there’s a “maximum bandwidth” definition around which your phone might’ve used, not everything that’s 4G from a technical POV is actually fast enough to fulfil that definition.
2G hardware indeed doesn’t cost the telecoms anything 4G/5G hardware can do 2G just fine, but there’s opportunity costs in the form of underused frequency spectrum. The airwaves aren’t cables, we can’t just run a second one to double the total available bandwidth.
It’s perfectly ok to keep 2g for iot devices and they cost nothing to maintain but I’m almost sure I connected to 3g last year in northern Germany.
All German providers had it shut down by 2021, Denmark by 2023, so best explanation that I have is that some 4G stuff got reported as 3G by your phone, the terminology isn’t unified and in particular there’s a “maximum bandwidth” definition around which your phone might’ve used, not everything that’s 4G from a technical POV is actually fast enough to fulfil that definition.
2G hardware indeed doesn’t cost the telecoms anything 4G/5G hardware can do 2G just fine, but there’s opportunity costs in the form of underused frequency spectrum. The airwaves aren’t cables, we can’t just run a second one to double the total available bandwidth.