This short tutorial explains how you can disable 4G or LTE on your iPhone. You may want to disable higher cellular speeds for various reasons. For instance:
1-Using LTE may decrease battery life.
2-Higher cellular speeds may cause data overage as a recent survey found that people with 4G LTE phones are likely to use twice as much data as those with 3G.
Depending on your carrier’s network (At&t, T-Mobile etc), the cellular settings on your device may differ.
See also: how to limit cellular data use
VoLTE iPhone: Turn off LTE
Voice over Long-Term Evolution (VoLTE) allows voice calls over a 4G LTE network. If your network supports VoLTE, then: (if you are not sure, here is how you can check)
- Tap Settings
- Cellular
- Cellular Data Options
- Then select ‘Off’, this will turn off LTE
- There are other settings also. This is what they mean:
- If you select Voice & Data, this means calls and data use will be over the LTE or 4G network.
- If you select Data Only, this means that data will be over LTE but not voice calls.
When you attempt to change this settings, you may see this error message: “”Cannot Activate LTE Calls. To enable LTE Calls on this account, contact your carrier.” or you may see a message saying to insert a new sim card. If you experience these problems, please contact your carrier (e.g., T-mobile, AT&T, Verizon etc)
Non-VoLTE iPhone
If you carrier does not support VoLTE, then:
- Tap Settings
- Cellular
- Cellular Data Options
- Then select 3G or 2G.
Please note that depending on your carrier, you may see a UMTS or LTE connection. UMTS, Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, is a 3G connection.
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