The Shutdown No One Prepared For
On October 6, 2026, Orange permanently switched off 2G across 44 French departments. Free Mobile was caught in the same wave — its 2G network runs on Orange's infrastructure via roaming agreements. By October 20, a further 43 departments will follow, completing the national cutoff.
In most people's minds, the end of 2G means old flip phones gathering dust in a drawer. In practice, it's quietly pulling the plug on a distributed professional infrastructure embedded across thousands of businesses.
A Vastly Underestimated M2M Estate
At the start of 2026, approximately 780,000 M2M SIM cards were still operating exclusively on 2G. These aren't in smartphones. They live inside payment terminals, personal emergency response systems for dependent individuals, residential and industrial alarm systems, IoT sensors for monitoring and metering, elevator equipment, and GPS tracking devices embedded in vehicle fleets. When 2G goes dark, these devices don't fall back to a degraded mode — they simply drop off the network entirely.
Arcep's figures put the scale in perspective: as of Q2 2025, there were still 5.6 million active SIMs running on 2G and 3G networks across all use cases. Migration rates have been accelerating — the quarterly decline in the 2G M2M fleet hit 21.5% in the last measured quarter — but hundreds of thousands of devices remain unmigrated with the national cutoff now upon us.
The First Hurdle: Getting an Inventory
For IT teams, the challenge starts before any technology decision is made. Many of these devices were originally deployed by specialist contractors — alarm installers, industrial integrators, telecare operators — operating outside the CIO's direct scope. They don't appear in the CMDB, and the SIM cards attached to them often sit under operator contracts entirely separate from the standard mobile fleet. Before you can migrate, you need to know what you actually have.
Migration itself is rarely as simple as swapping a SIM card. Many older terminals simply don't support replacement technologies. LTE-M — a 4G standard purpose-built for low-power connected devices — is the most suitable alternative for the majority of M2M use cases: coverage comparable to 2G, lower power consumption, and a relatively seamless path for applications that push periodic data. But in many cases, adoption means replacing the hardware entirely, not just the card.
What the 2G Shutdown Actually Reveals
Stripped back, the 2G shutdown is an IoT governance stress test. It exposes a persistent blind spot in enterprise information systems: the legacy connected-device estate, rolled out in successive waves since the mid-2000s, invisible in asset registers, and rarely factored into business continuity planning.
Operators communicated. Arcep published its quarterly monitoring reports. The timelines were publicly known for months. Yet migration delays persist. This isn't a technology problem — it's a scope problem. As industrial IoT projects accelerate across sectors, this episode is a sharp reminder that a credible connectivity strategy must account for device lifecycles and the organisation's ability to rapidly inventory a fleet dispersed far beyond the boundaries of central IT.