[bluGill]

cellular modems go nonfunctional/obsolete much faster than other systems. 3g is almost entirely gone worldwide. 4g is still around, but providers are already reducing how much their towers dedicate to it. The standards body is working on 6g, who knows when that will come and push out older stuff.

If the case of my car I don't care - I have never found a use for the cellular connectivity it has (if any). However there are lots of other devices where the cellular connectivity is important and users will want to upgrade the modem to keep it working. If cellular connectivity is just a marketing bullet point nobody cares about then integrated is good enough, but if your device really isn't useful without the modem make that modem replaceable for somewhat cheap.

[toast0]

4g should survive better than 2g and 3g, because the 5g standard allows for mixed mode deployments where the coordination channel runs as 4g, and the slots can be 4g or 5g dependening on what the client device is capable of. Running the coordination channel with 5g encoding could be a little more efficient, but it's not a big loss compared to running a minimum size 2g/3g allocation.

[vv_]

EDGE and E-GPRS is going to survive for at least another 5-10 years. Although this statement might not be globally accurate.

[vv_]

Generally the modem would support EDGE/E-GPRS (2G) and 3G simultaniously. In Europe, EDGE/E-GPRS is still quite popular and unlikely to be sunsetted in the next 5 years. It is a pity that many manufacturers tightly integrated the modem into their PCB, instead of creating a separate "communication box" - especially as some use-cases have the budget for it.