Just bought enough minutes for my Tracfone to last another year, but the website popped up this notice while I was there:
This is most likely 5G sh*t.

At the very least it means the equipment on cellphone towers is being gradually updated by switching more and more of the nodes on each tower to a newer transmission standard/protocol, which means there is less and less bandwidth available for phones that use the old protocol/standard. The bottom line is, I'll almost certainly have to stop using my perfectly good cellphone before it actually breaks or wears out and buy a newer phone.