3 Trimble Transportation The Fleet Manager’s Essential Guide to Evolving Wireless Networks What the 3G Sunset Means for You. Service degradation is on the horizon. The need for better, faster and more widely-available coverage has resulted in new networks with faster speeds and more bandwidth. All the major carriers have invested in Long Term Evolution (LTE) for many years now, and customers are experiencing LTE coverage where Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and High Speed Packet Access (HSPA+) were previously never available, such as rural and remote areas of the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Key Takeaways: | Wireless carriers are repurposing older 3G networks, specifically CDMA and GSM networks. | Coverage will start to degrade as cell towers are repurposed, meaning increasingly spotty coverage until they are shut off for good. | If you have 3G-powered onboard devices, ensuring your fleet’s connectivity will be reliant on 4G LTE- connected devices. To continue investing in LTE and the future, carriers must reallocate their portion of the spectrum from CDMA and Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) to LTE networks, rather than maintaining lagging, obsolete networks that cannot accommodate new technology and faster speeds. Fleets that are still reliant on these older networks will experience more and more service degradation. And the impact of this will really start to be seen over the next year.