No, the new option in this respect is to let corporates choose "No, never" for employee devices.

Previously (e.g. Android 13) if your cellular provider said you can choose "No" then there's a slider in your Settings so you can choose, otherwise it's greyed out and tells you "Name of Your Provider requires 2G to be available".

On corporate devices it's a pain to have settings that your users can screw up, and so it's nice when Android (or Apple for iOS) makes the setting something you can choose to lock down instead.

# Edited to correct text of fixed message when your cellular provider has decided you mustn't switch off 2G.

I just went and checked this option on my phone; Google Fi requires 2G to be available! seriously Google?

My fi phone does not require this. I suspect it is down to the baseband rather than the manufacturer or carrier.

Fi uses T-Mobile, so it would make sense that TMO MVNOs would also have to have 2G enabled.

The new feature (and underlying HAL) both explicitly allow the radio to ignore restrictions on network types when making emergency calls, so this is not the distinction being drawn.

There is also nothing the OS can do to shut down 2G in most cases; the best it can do is ask nicely that the baseband does not use it. So the "shut it all down" theory is also not correct.

Emergency call works slightly differently to normal calls, in particular, it could start with the phone completely disconnected from the tower. So specifically emergency call being available in 2G doesn’t mean the phone still registers on 2G.

It’s probably a legal requirement that if 2G is supported emergency calls on 2G must be also supported. Maybe there are some LTE-3G dualmode phones without GSM in the world, if that’s what you must have?

If a phone is already compromised to the point it can make emergency calls without the user intending it to, how helpful is it for the user to have disabled 2G?