Unhappy with 4G? Lock to 3G!

For years now buying a 3G handset and locking it to 2G has been quite popular. As reported here this was mainly done to get around poor battery life in 3G. Of course this would have an obvious impact on data performance as GPRS/EDGE networks struggle to deliver anything faster than a couple of hundered of kbps at best. From an operator (carrier for our US readers) point of view this was bad as it meant the legacy 2G network was still seeing quite a lot of traffic.

Considering the above it was interesting to see what the options are for 4G capable devices. A screenshot from the Network Mode menu of a Samsung SIII LTE is shown below.

As you can see gone is the option to lock to 2G and now the two options are either 2G/3G/4G (i.e. auto) or 3G only. I guess the option to disable 4G has to be there, from a battery life point of view, stability of early 4G networks and the problems with support for voice calls. But at least in my opinion the second choice should be 3G/2G as opposed to 3G only. I guess this will change depending on the device manufacturer so it will be interesting to see what others do.