And it will fails after only a few message, when the phone modem tries to authenticate the network (MME) and fails. LTE and 3G do have mandatory mutual authentication where the device authenticates the network very early on. It's 2G that's the problem: a 2G network does authenticate the device, but not the other way round, which opens the door to the well known MITM attacks on 2G (stingrays). The worst a LTE/3G rogue cell can do is try to attack the modem during the early non-authenticated messages (send corrupted messages), and waste UE time or jam it. But it can't do MITM.
So if you're paranoid and you can afford it due to good 3G/4G coverage, disable 2G on your handset ;)
I'm still using a iPhone4 with iOS 5.something on it, it's obviously un-patched or anything like that, the secret is that I don't have any baking applications installed on it nor is my email attached to any recurring payments scheme. The even deeper secret is that I don't have an online baking account set-up with my bank at all, as I don't trust any of the banks with their online security. I chose to eat up the opportunity costs of actually physically going to the the bank over the sometimes illusory security and ease-of-use offered by online banking.
These are the sorts of transparent attacks you don't notice and which cannot be mitigated with anti-virus or avoiding downloading sketchy apps. The sketchy stuff is already running on the device in the form of the OS and apps you use within it. Note that a large number of these vectors were never publicly disclosed including a vulnerability with Samsung Knox that I reported. When it was in use, the device would accept any cert.