In short:
Regional and rural Australians say their ability to make phone calls has dramatically reduced since the 3G network was switched off in October.
Telstra and Optus shut down 3G to boost the 4G and 5G networks, claiming customer coverage would benefit as a result.
What’s next:
The federal government says there may be a need for regulatory intervention if the situation does not improve.
Feels like the natural result of selling off our national infrastructure. Who’d have thunk it.
This whole thing has been a mess. Thousands of Aussies had to buy new phones due to them using a phone allowlist instead of a blocklist (arguably they should have just let the phones stop working instead of blocking them outright). The allowlist they used was missing hundreds of 4G capable phones and was missing just about every overseas model of phone. I know 2 people whose phones were blocked for no reason.
Tourists coming to Australia are finding their phones blocked here, preventing them from using their phones in Australia.
000 calls are borked for thousands of Aussies as well.
We are one of the only countries in the world to turn off 3G. And we’re certainly the only one to fuck it up this badly. I’m convinced the big telcos only did this to drive phone sales (many of which will be bought/leased on exploitative plans), because god knows there’s no other compelling reason to shut 3G off.
What a joke.
My phone doesn’t receive half of its incoming calls. I actually narrowed it down to the VoLTE keepalive packets being transmitted with a MAC address of 00:00:00:00:00:00 when on CLAT (which is Telstra default) on all Google Pixels. The connection silently dies, there is no return UDP route, so the phone won’t ring.
I reported it to Google, but they don’t give a shit. I guess the million or so people with a pixel can just deal with it.
It was falling back to 3G when it happened before. That’s not going to happen now.
<sarcasm> Have you tried buying a new Pixel, and throwing your old one into landfill?</sarcasm>
BuT tHe PiXeL iS a PrEmIuM pHoNe, LiKe ThE iPhOnE!
Google will always treat their users as the product, no matter how much you pay for their hardware.
I replicated the same problem on a newer pixel. I suspect it’s all of them.
It is a shame that there are no other premium Android Phones that are just a handheld internet communicator. Samsungs are so full of corruptive “I want to be iPhone” bloatware that they make the Chinese phones look appealing, the Chinese phones are so full of nationalist spyware that they make Linux Phones look like a valid option (even though they are also manufactured by Chinese companies) Xperia is also full of their proprietary software, Nokia is probably the best of a bad bunch.
I think this whole thing needs to become a political issue — I think people in the bush need to start complaining and we need to get 3G back," he said.
I understand where they are coming from, but 3G doesn’t inherently have better signal. The carriers may have fucked something up or they haven’t fully switched all of their old towers to 4G and 5G. And to be clear, both 4G and 5G can use the same low frequencies that 3G used, but are more efficient.
That’s not to say the rollout hasn’t been a bit of a mess with bad communication and last minute changes (the whole VoLTE emergency calling shitshow, for example).
The reason why enabling 3G would improve coverage is because low radio frequencies do travel further and are less affected by interference.
This is why AM radio travels further than FM radio and why 4WDers used to carry UHF for local communication and AM or HF for long distance emergency communication.
The reason why enabling 3G would improve coverage is because low radio frequencies do travel further and are less affected by interference.
Both 4G and 5G support low frequencies. The protocols have nothing to do with the frequencies they support, although it can seem that way particularly with 5G, which only used high frequencies when it was initially rolled out.
Both 4G and 5G support low frequencies.
Yep, and they’re in use too. Telstra/Optus/Vodafone all run 4G at 700MHz (compared to 850/900MHz for 3G). It’s slightly different for 5G, Telstra use 850MHz while Optus/Vodafone use 700MHz.
Australian Mobile Network Frequencies (Whirlpool)
Not to mention the thousands of phones that would be VoLTE capable but are blocked regardless…
This happened to me.
I had a Oneplus 7 Pro. I turned 3G off before the shutdown and it was fine.
Then Optus decided to brick my device because my phone wasn’t on their list of compatible devices.
Fucking assholes.
I then put a friends Telstra sim in the phone to see if it would work, and it was bricked on the Telstra network too.
Apparently I could roll the phone back two android versions, install a ROM I don’t want, give it root privileges which I don’t want, and fuck around with adb to make it work, but I shouldn’t fucking have to.
There should be a class action lawsuit for this shit. My phone was only five years old and worked fine.
Thanks for turning what I assume is tens of thousands of phones into e-waste so some dickhead with the latest 5G iPhone can take up an extra kilobit of bandwidth.
Happened two months ago, but I’m still mad.
Have you tried a Vodafone SIM? I’ve heard they’re less strict with their blocking.
