Australia to Block Internationally Purchased 4G/5G Phones as Part of 3G Shutdown | Hacker News Reader

Australia to Block Internationally Purchased 4G/5G Phones as Part of 3G Shutdown

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10 pointsrazodactyl6 comments

You'll get the dreaded unsupported announcements before each call if your phone drops down to 3G to make calls. There are ways to force 4G/VoLTE calling for phones (see below) but they can get impossibly cumbersome for even CS Major consumers because telstra wontfix.

Telstra are effectively refusing to allow international phones on their VoLTE network even though most devices have band 28 and are fully capable of emergency calls and the lot.

If your device works fully over 4G but isn't on their approved whitelist they are saying it will be kicked off regardless of 4G capability. Legally they claim to be unsure of your 3G override for calls even though it's assured by telstra enabling their network config properly and one extra step by users of xiaomi phones.

Easy things to try:

  *#*#86583#*#*

”VoLTE Carrier check was disabled” for xiaomi phones adds voLTE menu item in sim menu

  *#*#4636#*#*

brings up sim TESTING app (or Tap internal storage 7x) you can pin network to "LTE only" and shows IMS registration status

add a new APN with IMS/IMS/IMS for Name/APN/Type (should happen auto if your carrier has VoLTE enabled for your account so call them to make sure, this is meant to be default as of 2022)

check your phone has the required band 28 for telstra's non-standard VoLTE

Advanced things to try:

Modem Test Tools (Tap kernel version 7x > more menu) > apply different australian .mbn and CARRIER files from xda forums (needs latest OS, root)

latest Qualcomm Drivers plus the latest QPST-Tool windows software to apply .mbn files (requires PC, root then unroot)

otherwise switch carriers for your bands or get a new phone when the ban hammer comes down...

scaring people into overpaying for your phones as they can't tell how poorly they are about to be treated for totally unnecessarily reasons is quite a horrible act.

Australian telco guy here. No they won't.

Here's the law: https://www.legislation.gov.au/F2024L01103/asmade/text

When a telco IS CERTAIN that a phone won't work, they are obligated to tell the person, and offer them a free phone to replace it (subsidised by the government, it's mentioned in passing in the act linked).

Using a 4G enabled phone we've had messages at the start of calls stating service will be cut off with the 3G network but we've ignored it as a bug.

Didn't realise this was the case.

It was a bug. If the phone was not making VoLTE calls, the carriers were panicking. Instead, the phone was just trying 3g first, it worked, so VoLTE was never triggered.

VoLTE is just SIP. There's no longer two channels, one voice and one data, it's just the same one (and for those that know the REAL technical stuff, please accept that this is a deliberate simplification!).

the video mentions that some phones do not use VoLTE to call emergency numbers, which means after the 3G shutdown, those phones might fail this way. This makes carriers likely to block those numbers, and force you to buy new phone.

It sucks that the choice is to shutdown the 3G network.

2 Key words missing: "may" and "some"

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