Australia's 3G Shutdown – Why your 4G/5G Phone is now Blocked
medium.com
medium.com
In the UK, carriers are only allowed to provide coverage in any given area to a phone if it is able to make an emergency call (999/112) in that area.
i.e. if the phone says you have a signal, you must be able to make an emergency call.
So, for a phone to actually show you as being connected to the network:
a) There must be 2G/3G coverage available for a CSFB call to take place.
or
b) The phone must support VoLTE (including for emergency calls).
Newer LTE (and 5G) spectrum deployments, like Band 20 LTE (800MHz), are being used to provide coverage in rural areas - even in places where there is no 2G/3G coverage, therefore these newer bands are often only made available to devices that support VoLTE.
If you have an old phone, that doesn't support VoLTE (including for emergency calls), then it will only connect to 4G networks in areas where there is still an overlapping 2G/3G layer.
This approach means that the carriers have had an incentive to make all devices support VoLTE with emergency calling. It has also been possible for the carriers to promote the 800MHz coverage as only being available on newer phones with VoLTE.
Thus much of the problems that Australia is having have been avoided.
Also:
Data-only devices aren't included in this requirement, as they can't/don't make emergency calls.
Roaming devices aren't affected (as far as I know).
UK carriers support VoLTE roaming in the USA, given the lack of 2G/3G networks for CSFB.
Customers can only access that spectrum if they have a VoLTE compatible (including emergency call) device.
The carriers have legally binding landmass and population coverage goals as part of the spectrum licensing terms.
The carriers can also market the fact that better rural coverage is available on newer devices.
Therefore the carriers have only been selling fully VoLTE compatible devices for many years and pushing as many VoLTE-enabling software updates out as possible.
However 35% of UKians bring their own phone under SIM-only contracts.
When my UK carrier ( Hutchinson 3 ) was switching off 3G I had weekly scare-emails stating that my phone would no longer work. Of course it did support VoLTE and works fine, but in the background they were using a whitelist.
I have nothing but bad experience with these idiots anyway. Their support were real script monkeys. They were the worst provider in Ireland.
I guess the question is, how do they determine if a phone doesn't support VoLTE for emergency calls? That seems to be the problem in Australia, that there is no reliable way to detect it, so they're just using crude whitelists.
I can't say I've ever heard of a device in the UK supporting VoLTE for regular calls, but not supporting it for emergency calls.
There are no incoming emergency calls.
The instructions make no sense; they refer to settings which do not exist. At least as described.
Edit: Those were ordinary calls. For emergency calls I have zero experience. The last time I made one I had other things in mind then checking my network monitor app.
In 2022, I imported a Samsung Galaxy A02 phone from Turkey, which I bought there in a retail store. It works, but could use VoLTE with Globe or SMART, and the operators' personnel provide conflicting answers as to why. Finally, they revealed the existence of a whitelist of models. But it worked with DITO, which is a 4G-only operator, but even that is not an argument for Globe and SMART to extend their whitelist.
Same for the newer POCO X4 Pro (international version) which I bought online.
I tend to buy grey import handsets because they offer a better value proposition - by a long margin - than locally sold handsets. Allowing the carriers to define the block list only plays into their greedy little hands.
I know that "band 28" support is something useful to Australians who, like me, buy handsets from overseas. The support of handsets should be based on capabilities of the device, not a seemingly arbitrary list that's under the control of the carriers. But that's what happens when last minute decisions are made.
Lets see what happens with the under 16 social media blocking... There's no hurry, but will it be done in the stupidest and simultaneously most invasive manner possible, and probably forced through before Christmas even though there's no pressing need? Of course.
In Melbourne, the ticketing terminal in 200 trams and 2500 buses is now broken.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/free-ride-as-myk...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myki
TL;DR: Melbourne spent over $1.5B developing their very own tap to pay public transport card from scratch, which was and remains slow, glitchy and is already outdated (eg doesn't support payment with contactless credit/debit cards). Meanwhile, Sydney deployed an off the shelf system from Cubic at a fraction of the cost and the rollout was about as smooth as it gets.
There's still no travel card integration with phones, the only mobile device tap that's supported are standard credit cards -- but you can't give one of those to a child because you can't restrict a credit card to only allowing travel! It also doesn't track usage properly, so you can't tell what state you're in (tapped on or off).
They actually did develop a digital wallet card and matching phone app, rolled it out... to some country town... and then quietly dropped it.
My completely unfounded accusation is that someone in Transport NSW was getting kickbacks from Mastercard and/or Visa and a travel card app would have stopped the pork.
The Opal card project cost hundreds of millions of dollars and took way too long to deploy, so calling it a "success" is only in relation to even worse projects.
This is not 100% accurate. There is no card integration, but the Opal app does allow you too see pre-paid balances. It does usually show the tapped on/off status, but it may be delayed by a few hours (so it's not completely useful) especially outside of metro areas.
> They actually did develop a digital wallet card
Which never worked on iOS, it was Android only iirc.
> the only mobile device tap that's supported are standard credit cards
You can use Samsung Pay. Make the card inaccessible for normal NFC/touch payments, and only allow Samsung Pay Transit. On iOS I think you can use Express Mode? https://support.apple.com/en-gb/105079
We attempted smart card transport in NSW three times. TCard. There was another one that went bankrupt iirc.
Arguably there is much greater success with Opal vs. Myki.
Right, why can't I use a NFC app (of which I've tried many) to read my Opal card's state - the balance and whether I've tapped on and off? Frankly, it's a damn nuisance.
NFC apps read lots of information about the card, type manufacturer number serial number etc. but nothing that's useful like one's remaining balance. Yes, they can encrypt parts of the card to protect security but there's no need to inconvenience users by not telling them their balance.
Opal is, in effect, a machine-readable only system that takes power away from users. Thus, clearly its ergonomics are unacceptable.
I've also an Opal card with a crack in it which means its internal antenna wire is broken and the card won't respond to the machine. Unfortunately, it has a credit of between $60 and $70 on it and getting that recredited has been such a pain to the extent that I'll have to dissolve the plastic and reconnect the wire. Yes, the card could have been registered but why should I have to tell the government everywhere I go?
Similarly, the Opal system discriminates against those with confession cards in that they're tracked by default and their cards have a louder beep on machines that informs everyone nearby that the person is traveling at a cheaper rate. In my opinion, that's unacceptable and discriminatory (if necessary a ticket inspector could determine that with his handheld reader).
When I was living in Vienna several decades ago there were multiple ways to buy tickets, singles, weekly, monthly and so on. One was a card strip with multiple segments on it. You'd fold over to a blank segment (a split-second operation) and insert it in a time/route stamping machine on the bus/tram or train and that stamp was valid for an hour on any transport even if you changed mid route.
One could see with just one's eyes how much credit one had left and a ticket inspector could glance at the ticket and tell in an instant whether the ticket was valid or not. Also, the route number would tell him if you'd changed your mode of transport or not (that could be useful if one's latter transport was late, which it never was—Vienna's transport system is wonderful).
The ergonomics of that old-fashioned mechanical system were excellent and it worked like a dream. Much of this modern IT tech is done just for the sake of it and for the smart to make a financial killing from the gullible. And I say that as an IT professional.
It really annoys me that more people don't complain about poorly designed IT infrastructure that's barely fit for purpose. Like frogs in heating water, unfortunately we can be cajoled into accepting anything with minimal effort.
From my experience the card by itself can't provide that information. With a physical time stamp on a card it's immediately clear.
That's unfair because you are implicitly only comparing against successful rollouts.
Having used a variety of bus systems in South America and Auckland, I can say there are plenty of shitty systems out there.
I tried to use Auckland the other day and couldn't because I didn't have the required bus card. I couldn't use contactless payment from my phone and I had just arrived from overseas so no cash. I was told they don't accept cash anyway. I had to Uber instead.
After dealing with crappy overseas it was eye-opening to have multiple similar problems in my own country (not just bus access) e.g. cash machines don't support contactless so I couldn't get cash - I had lost my CC)
I can distinctly remember first time using tap on/off card to get around Melbourne and thinking how much more convenient it was then needing to use Paper ticket machines Sydney had at the time.
Wikipedia lists 2008 adoption for Melb vs 2012 for Syd that seems to align with my memory. So might have just been curse of them being an early adopter.
eg Tap on a bus, tram and train in Melbourne, get off in Wangaratta and tap on to a bus there.
There was going to be something like 29 zones, and all the requirements / edge cases / mucking around sent the cost through the roof.
Cubic is setting things up real nice to have exact data about a lot of peoples travels in cities all around the world. That could be some pretty valuable data.
which means the city would need to pay above the existing wage for those people, since they're _already_ employed and would have no incentive to jump.
> no incentive to mark up the price
and have no incentive to try to save money or find novel efficiencies, since the money spent is not "theirs".
What? I'm talking about salaried employees already working for the city.
> and have no incentive to try to save money or find novel efficiencies, since the money spent is not "theirs".
Even if they are not trying to actively save money, they are not trying to actively make a profit so it would still be cheaper.
You can't just throw people at a problem and assume they will get it done for some fixed cost. Experience and existing infrastructure and solutions actually matter, and can make something significantly cheaper than building from scratch.
Let's say you want to bake a loaf of bread. You're not a baker, so you don't have any of the skills, ingredients, or tools needed to bake this loaf. Also, you only want to bake the one loaf (just like building out a contactless ticket system is a single project that shouldn't need to be done over and over again).
Which would you expect to be cheaper and faster: 1. buying everything you need to bake a loaf of bread and doing it yourself or 2. walking to the nearest bakery and buying a loaf there.
Keep in mind that the bakery needs to make a profit, and you do not – so there is no way the bakery will end up being cheaper, right? And surely the seasoned professionals (who already have the necessary tools and ingredients) won't be faster at baking the loaf than you, a complete novice without those things.
If often is.
Organizations with preexisting staff and knowledge frequently implement things instead of outsourcing.
> Experience and existing infrastructure and solutions actually matter, and can make something significantly cheaper than building from scratch.
Coming up with a secure fare payment and tracking system isn't some cutting edge concept. Work would still be outsourced where necessary, like ordering or manufacturing the hardware.
> You're not a baker, so you don't have any of the skills, ingredients, or tools needed to bake this loaf.
That's where the analogy fails. Municipal governments would have people with the skills, acquiring ingredients and tools could be outsourced as needed, but 'baking a loaf of bread' could still be mostly an internal project.
It's a better use of tax payer money with the bonus that the city is not dependent on a third party for-profit entity.
Do you make your own clothes? Certainly it must be cheaper to do it yourself rather than buy a shirt from a company, right? Because they have their profits to worry about. Does every city have its own manhole cover factory? Why not? Certainly it must be cheaper to build your own manhole cover factory (forging manhole covers is not a hard problem, after all) rather than pay a company to do it. After all, the manhole cover company is burdened by profit motive, and the city is not.
Repeat ad nauseam.
You are severely underestimating how much a company will mark up the cost to make a profit.
> Do you make your own clothes? Certainly it must be cheaper to do it yourself rather than buy a shirt from a company, right?
Poor analogy. The fare system being talked about is a big investment that doesn't need to be replaced every year. A closer equivalent would be building your own computer, and yes many people do. The parts they manufacturer they still buy or have made.
> Repeat ad nauseam.
Except your analogy doesn't apply across the board and you know this. If we extrapolate from your reasoning a city shouldn't do anything themselves.
exactly correct. A city should be a bureaucratic, administrative organization that collects taxes, and funds projects. These projects should be done by professional project doers - such as construction companies, or IT companies, or bakers. There ought to be many project doers, all competing for the city's funding. The city's job is to find the lowest cost, highest value project doer to give them the project.
The people of the city chooses what projects to fund, and the city takes care of the administrative work of allocating the tax dollars. Nowhere in this loop should a city be keeping employees on hand in the expectation of projects that need doing.
Someone wrote an editorial that would not pass HN's comment policy, basically to the effect of "who would ever have guessed that it might snow in between Christmas and New Year?" and sidewalk-clearing went back to being a public task.
No it isn't. What nonsense. Cities have been doing things themselves all around the world for decades because it generally makes more sense.
> Nowhere in this loop should a city be keeping employees on hand in the expectation of projects that need doing.
They already do that, look at just IT for example, they maintain websites, databases, etc. They don't outsource everything, that's ridiculous.
Turns out when you have experience in the general area of baking bread, learning to bake bread isn't that hard.
If yes, do you hire someone else to replace the work they were doing?
If no, sounds like a lot of slippage.
People don't always have their billable hours fully booked.
Nevertheless a city is just a company that exists for a purpose.
Which is negated by the city not trying to make a profit and marking up the cost.
I find it hard to fathom that this would be a surprise.
https://danielbowen.com/2024/11/09/myki-and-3g/
I have a certain amount of sympathy for Myki's operator in this case, this would have been a difficult edge case to test.
Here in San Francisco some of the city transit system's bus tracking equipment that they use for real time arrival predictions was still using 2G when the 2G network shut down in 2017.
Then a different part of it was still using 3G when the 3G network shut down in 2022.
then we can know if something is affected by the full shutdown
https://www.wired.com/story/san-francisco-floppy-disks-muni-....
Possibly a hangover from the early days of European settlement, when the majority of settlers were convicts who needed keeping an eye on and dealing with with a firm hand.
How about regulating all social media to be healthy for all ages to use? The social media corporations should lose freedom, not the citizens. (IMO)
Maybe replacing Australia with their new paymasters in China makes more sense?
idk, there's RedStar OS, but no Kangaroo OS (tbf few countries have their own distro)
Which is also why IT business are required to hold expensive insurance policies, without which they can't approach clients, and which is also why the big four consulting firms have become so popular amongst the senior management: «it is not my fault, they are the ones who did it».
She'll be right, mate.
I think it's rated as the worlds second most litigious country. If you can think of it there is probably a law and a fine for it.
When I was young and dumb, i crashed into someone while driving recklessly. Constabulary offered me a driver education course as an alternative to punishment. Fwiw, it was an excellent course. I'd recommend it to any private driver.
I agree that there's such a thing as "national character" and that, although limited, it can offer insight.
It's problematic when you take it as gospel, and exclude visible facts. That's cheap and lazy.
Let's take a tangent: Britain's colonial past included racist mores. It's certain that racism is still part of life here today. However, in this dishonourable leadership board, we are nowhere near the top today. You can use "bananas thrown at black players per minute of professional football" as a proxy metric.
My point being, yes, history informs the present, but no, you cannot look at a time period and assume it tells you everything about a nation. Nations, like people, change.
Let us examine the elephant that you're studiously ignoring:
- capital punishment is now, in practical terms, outlawed (technically, hanging is still a possible sentence for treason, but that's obviously because it's never been worth parliament's time to debate). - the prison service does a number of things that indicate some level of commitment to rehabilitation - judges and magistrates have sentencing guidelines that are in line with other western european nations - custodial sentences are rare for non-violent crimes - "first offence" is a mitigating factor in sentencing - debtor's prison is a distant memory
The judicial and policing regime today looks nothing like the regime in which you could be transported for stealing food, and in which punishment involved forced labour and in which abuse by the guards was a desired feature.
The reason for the change is the will of the people. We did not have change imposed on us. We, over time, decided that we weren't going to hang and transport into penal servitude any more. We elected Robert Peel, repeatedly, who reformed the police most excellently. I'm fucking proud of Peel. Look him up.
You don't have a leg to stand on. I doubt you have a leg anywhere in your home. You eat off a board on the floor because your table doesn't have a leg. You travel in circles because you don't have an outbound or a return leg. Your children play with just "o" and when you pass they will receive your acy. You are totally unequipped to discuss islation.
Apologies to the usual address, please.
Oí mate, do you have a loicense for that bantz.
Britain is a police state, your extended screed sounds like you’re still tying to convince yourself otherwise.
Always feels the government is riding the public far too much. The government is arrogant and corrupt.
Also the recent issue with Qantas Chairman's Lounge. A privilege tier that is invite only, and gets exclusive lounge and upgrades ahead of the most loyal paying customers, reserved for people of influence, including the Prime Minister. Qantas had prevented competition from flying routes to Australia to keep their margins high. I wonder how that anti-competitive practice went without issue? I guess because all politicians and people of material influence are getting free upgrades on the backs off those high margins and actual paying customers.
If speeding cameras were being used to track and spy on people then that would be a serious problem, but if they're just being very effective at catching speeders, that seems fine? Speeding is a major safety problem, and one of the main problems with speeding is that enforcement is so sparse, drivers are tempted to speed knowing that they usually get away with it.
Like I feel like the standard for traffic cameras is they should be temporary installations used in an investigation to figure out why so many people speed or run red lights or something. And yep, they do eventually figure out interesting tricks.
This one's dumb, but an observation I noticed lately is lots of intersections will change to all red and then light the pedestrian walk light before they change the car light to green. Why? Probably to lower the amount of people crossing the street getting hit by someone turning right in their car. Neat trick.
That is exactly the reason, you can find plenty of studies on it!
These things in isolation, to me, can seem minor, but when combined, it feels a little like death by a thousand cuts.
No actually, the town I went to college in installed cameras at 3 intersections and was able to get rid of them at 2 after figuring out solutions.
And honestly, a LOT of red light runs are stupid silly ones where, for example, the green left turn arrow lights up first! Then the person next to them goes without realizing that straight traffic has a red light. i see that all the time.
Dunno, just a guess. My city started doing this pattern a few years ago and I am very curious about the research backing it up. It does make me feel “safer” crossing streets at busy intersections. But I’d be curious what the actual rationale says about it.
Fines are even more lucrative relative to the extent that speeding is actually a problem.
Australia has an average "top speed" of 100km/h (110km/h in certain states) - whereas many other countries, with varying degrees of better or worse infrastructure, have average "top speed" of 130km/h - and yet have similar traffic fatalities.
Turkey: 130km/h (and fairly poor infrastructure compared to europe): 6.7 fatalities per 100k France: 130km/h (most people drive at ~145 on highways - only 1 point if you hit a radar) - 5 fatalities per 100k Australia: 100km/h - 4.5 fatalities per 100k
It can't just be speed, otherwise other 'similar' countries would be orders of magnitude above Australia.
It's not just speed.
The standards of driving in Australia is terrible. There's an aggressive attitude, tail gating, no lane discipline, if someone is going way under the speed limit, you come to an overtaking lane, go to over take they'll speed up as "you are not passing me" etc. If you watch "Dash Cam Owners Australia" on YouTube half the incidents are avoidable but because "It's my right of way" or "I'm in the right" the driver will drive straight in to the incident rather than give way and avoid ignoring being “dead right” is still dead.
I've driven/ridden in countries with terrible roads, no real rules, and to the average person looks like chaos but it seems to just work. The difference is non of these countries are aggressive drivers.
When I moved to Australia I used to think the low national speed limits were silly. Now I think it'd be carnage if they are increased given the Australian driving standards.
I also think the same formula holds for shipping companies, cellphone carriers, and airlines. All airlines suck, all cellphone providers suck and all shipping companies suck too. Oh and banks too.
Some countries require much more training, have higher standards of vehicle maintenance, and have other cultural differences.
Did you know [1] that Germany, land of unlimited-speed-limit autobahns, has 3.7 road deaths per 100,000 inhabitants and 4.2 deaths per billion vehicle-km?
While the USA has 12.9 road deaths per 100,000 inhabitants and 6.9 deaths per billion vehicle-km?
Australia, with 4.5 road deaths per 100,000 inhabitants and 4.9 deaths per billion vehicle-km is in between.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
I’ve driven the world most dangerous roads that’s my thing. Often you wouldn’t even call them roads.
I felt more safe on a goat track with a coach coming the other way and sheer drop at the side of the road or highway with cows in the middle of the road and chaos traffic than Australia. Even 150mph down the Autobahn felt safer than 110kmh on an Australian highway.
Every car journey in Australia I play a game, spot the potential accident ahead as someone nearly crashes or does something stupid.
Watch dash cam owners Australia, half of it’s avoidable but the driver drives straight in to it rather than defensively avoid putting themselves in a dangerous situation
It’s absolutely an attitude/cultural issue. They have a lengthy process to get a license however I notice there’s a preference of parents teaching their bad habits vs professional driver training.
I wouldn't say Australia is fine but it is almost in a different ballpark. The frustrating thing here, in the US, is the ambivalence.
I think this is common in many places where a significant portion of the population lives in low density areas (eg: American, Australian and Canadian suburbs.) Outside of major city centers it is very difficult to live without a car, so states and provinces choose to set a very low bar for acquiring and keeping a driver's license.
The speed limit is already 130km/h in Northern Territory anyway.
Putting cameras in places where people are likely to speed so you can get more money would be directly correlated with being most impactful at reducing speeding. Another free market win in my mind.
On the other hand, if your aim is to maximise revenue, then project success means issuing as many tickets as possible. Installing clear speed limit signage? More profitable if we don't. Making the cameras clearly visible, so people can slow down in good time? More profitable if we don't. And if there's a wide, safe freeway with great visibility and no history of accidents? Well, that's going to be a profitable place for cameras, as people will feel safe going fast.
Everything except for his incredible documentation has either been minor anecdote ("my phone doesn't work"), or Industry & Government spin- usually misrepresentations at the least.
Bravo James.
The governmental failing here is a lack of foresight and a lack of regulation. The government (or ACMA, ideally) should have and exercise powers to hold the telcos to account, force them to pay for / execute notification campaigns over years, prove that emergency calls worked reliably in the first place, etc.
(RCS has essentially the same problems until Google essentially monopolized it... which creates a big single-point failure problem on its own.)
Wireless "progress" has been anything but. The 3G shutdown created dead zones where before I had adequate data connectivity. Even today I keep the 5G functionality of my phone turned off because 4G gives a consistently more reliable connection and faster data rates.
You most certaintly did not leave for the same reason. AT&T is a special level of shitty with their device whitelisting. Verizon and T-Mobile do not whitelist. Verizon shut down their old CDMA network and you needed new devices.
3G WCDMA (which is what topic is discussing) was the last circuit centric standard, it actually sucked for footprint and was way more complex on the carrier end to deploy. It was so bad that when the iphone 3GS launched signal storming kept crashing out AT&T's 3G network.
Haven't missed using 3G on T-Mobile but they actually still keep the 2G signal alive in their guard bands which is fun for running retro devices.
> Even today I keep the 5G functionality of my phone turned off because 4G gives a consistently more reliable connection and faster data rates.
Verizon and T-Mobile have enough resources on 5G now that breaking gigabit speeds is pretty common, without mmwave. I've run my primary net on wireless for most of the decade and it's improved every year as new bands get deployed. First year of 5G was not great, now it's fast and most of the spectrum is on it.
However, the vonr/volte 4G/5G sip profile situation is really shit even without asshole operators doing whitelisting, it's a problem for emergency calls and probably one of the reasons t-mobile kept their 2G on air still, just as a CYA.
Happened twice to my family members, switched them both to AT&T. In both cases I bought phones advertising Verizon support, and double-checked that the frequency bands were supported. In one case, the phone worked for a while with moving the Verizon SIM into it from the old phone (except for SMS). When I mentioned that to Verizon, they said I shouldn't do that, and it would be disabled randomly after Verizon systems noticed it was an unsupported phone.
They don't. There's one thing they do that's annoying as hell though. esim technically only needs a EID to activate, but most carriers use a database of EID to IMEI pairings, since the IMEI is much shorter to read out. Verizon will not let an esim device they don't know or recognize the IMEI of to activate. For me that means they refuse to activate my esim.me in a oneplus 11 which is an otherwise cleared device on their network with a built-in esim.
I have a removable esim called a euicc (from esim.me, there are cheaper versions now) and T-Mobile is currently the only US carrier that will activate using just a EID. I can then take the card out and even use back to 3G era devices, they don't care. (I have a K850i from 2007 I've done this with, it works on 2G currently since 3G turned off).
But then AT&T altered the deal. Had firmware that could do VoLTE, but AT&T doesnt care.
Well I've got an xperia now that is on their whitelist and I'm doing the same strategy again but hey, if only we had an actually useful FCC and FTC to police anti-consumer, monopolistic actions. Too bad we elected for the exact opposite a week ago.
A couple of questions to the Australian mates here:
If I enter Australia as a tourist with my phone, which worked there 5 years ago, do I probably end up with a phone that will work only on WiFi and place calls only with WhatsApp or other similar apps? I assume this is the case.
What are tourists doing to workaround this problem? Do they buy the cheapest throw away phone at a phone operator shop at the airport?
Also emergency calls aren't routed via roaming, so you are very likely to end up not being able to make a call for help.
I have given up on politicians having any use at all.
That said, for telcos/the government to unilaterally decide that people's handsets are no longer working (with little to no notice and no financial compensation) is a bit on the nose.
The correct thing would be to let customers come into store with an existing plan and handset, and give them a new phone and bill that back to the government so there's no interruption to services for them.
RIP 3G, you were pretty good.
I’m not sure I agree. Why is that the right thing? It’s a politically popular approach but not clear there’s a right/wrong here. For example, people might buy second-hand 3G headsets to get brand new ones on the government’s dime.
A load of older IoT devices and POS terminals are likely not working anymore though. That's a harder problem to solve.
As the article explains, many handsets which can access 000 are being blocked.
My iPhone XR can't make calls anymore, for example.
- Previously, phones that weren't whitelisted could connect to 4G for Internet, and disconnect & fall back to 3G for calls.
- Voice calling on 4G is finicky, and carriers don't like supporting random customer bought contraptions trying to do it.
- (you can whine all day about how calling is the sole defining feature for an object to be a "phone", doesn't change the fact that calling on 4G is a carrier-grade ever-beta duct tape hack).
dc: iiuc
And while progress may be good, risking people’s lifes for it isn’t. You can be mad on the device vendors for not implementing the technology, the standard inventors for not defining the VoLTE standard well enough, the government for not having any foresight at all, the operators for being profit driven. But you cannot just ignore it and turn off 3G and risk people’s lifes. Apart from that it’s just pure idiotism to also ignore the half million people that are losing any mobile network.
Plan it better, or punish operators or vendors more, but not ignore their and your incompetence completely and just continue shutting down integral mobile network services.
I'm really just going on a tangent rant, but I don't like that the word "legacy" has been associated with negative connotations in the tech world.
In the rest of the Anglosphere, a "legacy" is something to be admired and respected. Being old with stories to tell is a sign that someone or something weathered and survived the tests of time above all others.
Only in the tech world do I see legacies shunned in favour of the next new shiny at speeds that make progressives blush in embarrassment.
With 4G, a lot of SS7 functionality has been moved to a different protocol that's more resilient and less (obviously) designed to be used to spy on foreign assets. There's still a level of firewalling necessary for any operator that cares about security, but it's not nearly as bad as on SS7.
3G wasn't designed to be forward-compatible. It expects to have a dedicated frequency band it can operate on. But spectrum is limited, and telcos really don't want to reserve something like 25% of what little spectrum they have to support a handful of legacy devices.
4G/5G support Dynamic Spectrum Sharing. This means a single frequency can be used to carry both technologies, with the ratio between them adjustable as demand varies. With DSS a 5G base station reserving a tiny fraction of transmission time for legacy 4G emergency calls would be absolutely trivial, which makes future hard shutdowns unnecessary from a technical POV.
I'm going to be very pretty pissed if this is blocked because of a stupidly-drafted law...
The carriers are blocking overseas import devices that don't support VoLTE even if the device can't even make calls at all.
Luckily sanity prevails in this case at least!
Unfortunately from my experience with our Government and big companies like Telstra, I honestly completely expected they might have just blindly blocked even devices like this even though they are obviously not even able to make calls...
As for the problem itself, I can understand government regulators not wanting to micro-manage the situation, but the carriers know what's on their networks, and a divide-and-conquer approach would seem capable of reducing the number of handsets to something manageable. For example, the Asus Rog phones are quite expensive, and official communication with Asus would seem enough to learn what they're capable of and what firmware upgrades may be coming. Done. In general, carriers shouldn't be blacklisting anything. If you're buying a non-carrier-branded phone, caveat emptor. But in Asus' case, at least, I expect they would try to make it right.
I actually applaud the Australian government for being involved at all, as there was nary a peep from the US government and lots of people were forced to buy new phones who really didn't need them. The sin here seems to be throwing a "plan" together at the last minute.
It affects all telephone calls. Presumably people don't notice it because they use voip apps (eg. whatsapp) instead.
That requirement forces phones to have some degree of special handling for emergency calls. It may have required (or been interpreted to require) that a phone make emergency calls over 3G if VoLTE was unavailable. I can imagine someone deciding that means "lets just use 3G for all emergency calls" because who ever expected a case where 4G was available and 3G was not.
I'd expect that to be everyone that thought about it for more than a few seconds. Both because eventual replacement was obvious and because sometimes you only have partial coverage.
Many DAS/Distributed Antenna Systems, essentially networks of antennas placed inisde buildings to extend cellular coverage indoors, are costly and must be approved on a per-operator basis. Some of the DAS solutions requirements I've seen to provide full coverage for Optus, Telstra and Vodafone in 4G only in a 30 story building or medium sized mall, wanted 18 full racks, 100 amp 3 phase power connectivity, 15kw minimum redudancy cooling capacity, 8 hours of battery backup for all racks and cooling, all located in the centre of the facility to minmize cable runs. As a result, high quality DAS systems don't exist in every large building or campus environment. Even in 2024, we see buildings nearing the end of construction before the developer bothers to consider an appropriate DAS system, and at that point they balk at the space and location requirements, and refuse to understand why a DAS can't just be installed in 4RU in a crammed comms room thats the size of a domestic bathroom.
By the time 4/5G are built out well, I'd expect 3G to win some and lose some, becoming more of the latter every year.
Unless the plan was to switch all the 3G equipment over to 4/5G simultaneously, making 4/5G become reliable overnight?
> due to its superior ability to penetrate through buildings
That's a feature of low frequencies. I don't think 3G does better anywhere if you compare the same frequency. And a bunch of the frequencies are exclusive to newer protocols, aren't they?
Not necessarily, it depends on how the network operators laid out their bands. In theory I suppose it could free up adjacent bands for more network capacity.
> a bunch of the frequencies are exclusive to newer protocols
Depends on where you are in the world. In the US the FCC has been growing out the number of available cellular bands. Cellular technologies can work on just about any frequency, given the handset supports the appropriate bands.
2G/3G tend to be a little bit more power efficient than more modern technologies as _generally_ they require less processing overhead on the handsets. However, LTE/5G do better with error correction and lower signal strength. You also get higher capacity. Stuff like GSM uses a round robin time sharing mechanism which can quickly get saturated in dense environments.
2G is _mostly_ there for legacy applications. The reason why it breaks down for this case is because a lot of older handsets negotiate 2G first before switching over to LTE, and then 5G.
It's part of the different mobile phone standards. Emergency calls get location information with them (AML), can be sent on other networks and without SIM card, they can be dialed on international short codes (eg: you can dial 112 in the US and 999 in the EU and it will connect regardless). There are many more differences.
The main drivers at the time were network coverage (your SIM might have no coverage, but a network you are not allowed to roam for ordinary calls in has) and congestion (emergency calls can preempt ordinary calls).
In the GSM (2G) standard, and all of its successors, emergency calls are treated as a special case.
Your phone does not simply place a regular call to 911 or other local emergency number.
The pgone instead goes into a special mode where it can connect to any available carrier network to place the emergency call.
It seems to be the case that some older phones didn't support placing an emergency call over VoLTE, so they just fell back to using 2G/3G when that was still available.
https://www.att.com/scmsassets/support/wireless/devices-work...
This makes me wonder, is calling the emergency services number (911 / 119 / etc) now restricted to only such mobile phones officially supporting the protocol? This means you can't dial the emergency number from a pay phone or landline? I'm really confused about the underlying logic here.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIJavqEzEIw
at the time of writing the above video is listed in the OP article near the beginning. I believe Hugh references James' work in this and other videos covering the topic.
Wonder how so? Surely closing small roads don’t make the highway users go faster.
> One would assume that the Shutdown of the 3G network would only impact those with phones from last decade, or those unwilling to upgrade.
Even if that would be the case, how is it acceptable to impact those? What frequency of "upgrading" is expected to be obligatory in the future to allow the always newer eras?
It does if closing the small road frees up space (spectrum) to widen the adjacent highway (4G/5G).
There's also now a tool for looking up IMEIs although as described in the video the results are wrong https://www.telstrawholesale.com.au/3G-Network-Closure-Block...
No it's not reasonable at all. If my phone cannot make emergency calls, why would you block other services on it? Surely it is better I can call my wife and ask her to call emergency than not being able to use the phone at all? I fail to understand how this regulation was framed and why the author thinks this makes sense.
It's kinda hard to do these days though..
If its going to fuck over the public no one gives a shit.
> […]
> This Industry has tried to pretend that 4G devices that rely on 3G for 000 are ‘hardwired’ this way and the only solution is to buy new devices, when that could not be further from the truth.
> […]
> Blocking handsets is to entirely sweep the compatibility problem under the rug. > > By making this change, the industry and regulators are entirely absolved of any responsibility or accountability for failing to properly address the issues with Calling and Emergency Calling over 4G.
Industry has captured government and policy throughout capitalist countries. We're at the end-stages of capitalism having any veneer of good for society. It'll just keep getting worse and worse as we pay more and corporations deliver less.
Remember when you could go to the bank and there was an adequate number of tellers? Maybe that's still the case where you live. Not where I am.
Remember when you could call customer service and get help within a reasonable wait time? Good luck getting to a human being without mashing the numpad and repeatedly telling the robot you want a human / operator / other.
Remember when wages rose with inflation? I don't. I wasn't born early enough to experience that. But I've seen the graphs.
Remember when unions had collective bargaining power? That's been true more or less for the first time in my life in recent years. It's about the only shred of hope I've got for this system.
TLDR: every deal with a corporation is designed for us to lose and it will only become more so with time.
"We are experiencing a higher than normal volume of calls."
I've never actually done normal banking business inside a bank before. Practically every transaction I've ever needed with any bank I've had an account with has been entirely online or through the mail. The only exception was needing large bills for a cash transaction one time, in which that teller was pretty much just an ATM with fatter bills and it wasn't even my bank just a random one nearby that charged me $1 to withdraw several thousand in cash with a debit card. Their ATM out front would have charged more to dispense $20's.
They are, it's called VoLTE/VoNR. For whatever reason telcos add whitelist schemes to prevent phones from making voice calls, even if they actually support it.
Therefore, it is not compliant with the legislated requirement that all phones must be able to make emergency calls on any network. By blocking it, the telcos cover their ass, at the expense of the consumer having to upgrade - even if said phone was actually possible to make work with a bit of software tweaking/upgrading.
Not to mention that there's an alternative way to fix this problem - create an app to make emergency calls over data network, which would work in theory (it's only voip that isnt standardized). This is exactly what india did, with their Jio app.
I don't know exactly, but I think they prioritised the release of the LTE standard for data networks, and thought that voice could be sorted later.
Also, there's its inept handling of spectrum management—the inappropriate deregulation of spectrum management including the outsourcing of EMR/RF interference standards/enforcement to commercial interests which has resulted in a higher RF noise spectrum background.
If that were not enough there's the inept handling of the way the country deregulated the phone/telecommunications services where inept governments of both right and left persuasions sold off the government telecommunications business (Telecom Australia [previously PMG's Dept.]) to become a public corporation, aka Telstra.
In the process and to maximize profits they also sold off the cableways/rights of way that effectively nuked any decent competition (Australia being such a large country that duplicating infrastructure that was put in place over the previous 130 years or so would be an enormous undertaking and cost many billions). With Telstra now controlling and monopolizing this wealth of network infrastructure contributed by many generations of Australians the competition, Vodafone and Optus, would have to duplicate the network and that cost untold billions.
Governments reaped short-term monies but the poor hapless consumers paid for it many times over and are still doing so.
Right, a cableways authority to share the common resource would have made much more sense. As Australian telecommunications infrastructure has a flag-fall attached, competition is in name only. And the Government is likely to repeat the fuckup as it will sell off the NBN.
The NBN/National Broadband Network/fibre was (and still is) the next almighty fuckup which books could be written about. The saga is far too long and involved to detail here but resolves around whether copper or fibre should be installed in homes. Needless to say the shortsighted short-term copper approach was adopted.
Again, selling off the NBN will once again repeat the cableways problem.
Greedy market forces, weak-minded and gullible politicians and a lack of technical people with commonsense and nous means Australia is set to repeat these problems over and over.
Now we have this latest 3G/4G fiasco. Only two days ago I found that my standby 4G phone that I use as a backup now does not work even though the Telstra account is valid and paid up well into December this year!
Over the last 30 or so years Australian citizens have paid dearly for these fuckups—duplicated cableways infrastructure and such. Heavens knows how many unnecessary billions have gone into the pockets of those who've managed to twist politicians around their little fingers.
For well over a century Australia has mismanaged its radio and telecommunications services to the extent that it ought to be held up to the world as an exemplar of what NOT to do. The country's ineptitude is, frankly, beyond belief.
China, if you're reading this why don't you just walk straight in and take over? The country's in too much of a shambles and disorganized to resist, and on recent evidence you're much, much better at installing nationwide infrastructure than we could ever dream of.
I'll just refer you to graffiti once painted on a Besser block wall that surrounded a trotting course not far from where I live. To quote:
The Australian people are bloody-minded sheep.
It remained there for decades and no one—no even the local council—ever attempted to remove it or paint over it. Why? Because all too many know it's true.
The graffiti eventually disappeared when the wall was knocked down when the trotting gave way to high-rise apartments. I always meant to take a photo of it and I'm now kicking myself that I didn't.
Nothing to shutdown.
Capitalism ho!
Nothing about 3G (UMTS/WCDMA) technologies mean that it has more range than 2G, 4G, or 5G networks on the same frequencies.
If anything, the opposite is true due to Cell Breathing:
The problem is inept government, not capitalism.