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.
Not to mention the thousands of phones that would be VoLTE capable but are blocked regardless…
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.
They’re all too bloated. I would not purchase a handset unless I could install GrapheneOS or LineageOS on 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.
(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
IIRC the issue is that phones must be able to dial 000 if there’s any mobile coverage at all. A bunch of VoLTE-capable phones either force 3G for 000 calls or aren’t compatible with Telstra’s custom VoLTE implementation, and there’s really no way for telcos to know these things.
There’s no way for the owner to know, either. A bunch of 4G+VoLTE phones in the wild that people think are fine either can’t call 000 or can’t call 000 on Telstra’s network. So a phone on Optus might work fine on Optus VoLTE, might call 000 fine on Optus VoLTE, but wouldn’t be able to call 000 if there was only Telstra network coverage.
And there’s no way for Optus to know which specific modem firmware your phone has, so even getting the same model phone and testing it isn’t a reliable solution.
Yep that’s the explanation I’ve heard. Telcos shifting this mess onto the consumer is pretty obviously not ideal. They shouldn’t have gone ahead with the 3G shutoff knowing these issues existed.
They could have waited 4-5 years for the majority of Aussies upgrade to a new phone that supports Telstra’s VoLTE, implemented a fallback system on Telstra’s network for phones that don’t support it, etc.
But they didn’t.
Super poor form imo. If our government were serious about protecting Australians they would do something to punish these companies. But they won’t. And our slow slide towards America-style late-stage capitalism will continue.
This is a pretty good rundown of how fucked it is https://medium.com/@jamesdwho/australias-3g-shutdown-telcos-to-block-working-4g-5g-phones-2bf41e95de8a And now why there’s more interest in “restoring” IMEIs to compatible, but blocked, handsets than there was a year ago.
Feels like the natural result of selling off our national infrastructure. Who’d have thunk it.
Well, sort of but not really. Telecom had no 3G infrastructure - it didn’t exist yet when the carrier was privatised.
But, I agree with you in essence that Telecom would not have disabled 3G like this. I also do not think they’d have decommissioned the analogue phone network when they did. Which also affected rural customers at the time.
Yeah I was one of the 3G / NextG subcontractors between Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Broken Hill.
Amps gear was tossed outside the huts and would be collected at an undetermined date.
The original 3G cabinets were not up to spec, so our crew after installing at many locations needed to revisit sites and install amplifiers. What a waste of resources.
Was bad enough having to visit some sites due to their location, but twice was a nightmare. Not to mention every time we made changes on the towers we needed to get in each antennas zone, call 000, confirm molly & scrambling codes. To imagine how many of these “Telstra test calls” they would have been receiving during the rollout, poor bastards.
clearly not us, cause we’ve done it half a dozen times before and almost certainly will do it another dozen times.
Regulatory intervention is supposed to happen before the issue occurs, not after…
It was Regulatory intervention that caused this problem.
Government: “you need to make sure that your subscribers can access 000” Telcos: “we can only do this if we disconnect 3G” G: “that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever but we will believe you and give you carte blanche to
screw over your customerscomply with regulatory requirements”The problem was that some handsets (including ones sold by the networks as “4G”) would drop to 3G for 000. Even same models on different firmware behaved differently. So the regulator said to ban any the networks weren’t 100% sure were compatible. With 30(?) days’ notice. And the online IMEI checker is incomplete/useless too. So now the only realistic place for average consumers to buy known-compatible handsets is from the network operators. At their prices, with their software.
…And the governments Knee-jerk legislation was due to the Telcos not investing enough in redundancy.
When a little bit of a wind can bring down the mobile network, maybe it is time to build more cell towers and make sure they have a stable battery backup.
I had a family member recently purchase an imported Lawn Mower and its Wireless features bought down his local cell network.
IANA Telecommunications Engineer, but making critical Infrastructure secure and redundant should be a high priority.
The Mirboo North outage and the mower issue only effected one of the 3 mobile network providers; starting with O and ending in S.
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)
