Update July 31, 2025 at 10:36a.m. ET: Rogers has now pushed back the 3G shutdown until August 7, 2025. Read our full story to learn more.
As we’ve been reporting, Rogers is cutting its 3G network in Canada on July 31, affecting some Freedom Mobile subscribers who roam on Rogers. For those who don’t know, modern Freedom plans allow subscribers to roam on other carriers’ networks within the country. Therefore, Freedom relies on Rogers’ infrastructure in parts of Canada.
Freedom’s support page says the first wave of the Rogers shutdown will occur in Quebec and parts of Ottawa before spreading to the rest of the country. This means you’ll need a phone that supports VoLTE and is compatible with the Rogers network. As of the time of writing, we’re still trying to track down precisely what this means, but it seems that a majority of phones not sold in Canada or at Rogers will struggle to make voice calls.
For most users who have a modern phone from the last five years or so, you should mostly be fine. Most phones support 4G so you should be able to get online. However, to make calls over 4G, your phone must support a service called VoLTE.
While VoLTE support seems straightforward, it’s anything but. As we’ve been researching the Rogers shutdown, there seem to be various ways to support VoLTE, and not all carriers or phone manufacturers follow the same guidelines. It’s unclear if this can be solved by device makers either. OnePlus told us that it’s rolled out an update to the OnePlus 10 series and newer to support VoLTE in Canada, but I’ve gotten a handful of emails from OnePlus users who could not get service on Rogers.
Freedom says you can dial #8378 to see if the shutdown will impact your device. If you hear a warning that your call can not be completed, it means your phone won’t be able to make calls once the 3G network shuts off. The company also has a webpage to help determine what phones will be supported. You can check out some other troubleshooting steps here.
If you have a really old phone that only supports 3G, you will have to switch carriers, but at some point over the next year or two, you will need to get a new phone as Bell and Telus begin to roll back their 3G networks as well.
Source: Freedom Mobile
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