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this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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It's pretty similar to the analogue tv signal shutdown in 2010. The difference though was you could buy a digital tuner and plug it into your tv and keep using it.
3G is taking up a lot of spectrum space and they need to free it up for future data technology. It is also used by a very small (and shrinking) percentage of people, while costing too much to maintain.
It has to die. Telcos gave more than a year's warning. Then an extended grace period. I don't really know how they could have done this without annoying some people.
While I move in a bubble of nerds who tend to have decent gear, I don't actually know anyone affected by this shutdown first-hand.
They gave minimal warning about the emergency calling issue, and only a few weeks warning on the fact that "non-compliant" devices would be outright blocked (and each network has their own method on deciding on what is or isn't compliant).
And even the requirement for VoLTE support wasn't communicated early on.
Nevertheless, I agree that 3g needs to go just that it's been characterised by poor communication and heavy handedness.
there's a few people I know that's been affected btw
i get that there's a need for 3g to be shut down but there's no need to ban phones with 4g data capability that can't call without 3g (lacking voip implementation), the telcos could've just provided an app to do it because voip is just a protocol over ip
it's pretty fucking obvious that the telcos bribed the government into forcing them to block these devices because they get more money that way, they don't have to pay for the ewaste they artificially create and they don't look bad because they can just say that they're 'forced by legislation' to do so
How do the telcos get more money? A few phone sales are not going to do anything to their profits. They own the 3G infrastructure, it's theirs. They could have legally turned it off years ago and there's nothing anyone (including the government) could have done about it. Forcing them to sell a service is no different to forcing Woolies to sell your favourite brand of peanut butter. You can argue that the Government of the day should never have sold 100+ years of infrastructure investment and only privatised the retail side of Telstra - and would 100% agree with you. But that horse bolted 30 years ago. The simple truth is that all our phones rely on three companies and with few exceptions, there are no guarantees the service will work. As that Optus outage a year ago demonstrated.
I'm all about bashing on the telcos when they deserve it. But they've handled this about as nicely as was possible. They've been warning everyone for over a year. They've been individually messaging affected phones for months. Nobody can really say they didn't get warning.
I don't really agree with blocking IMEIs of phones they didn't sell because they're not sure they'll work without 3G. But I see the reasoning for it. They can't make a regular call today, but they can make an emergency call. They are forcing that pain now, while the phone can still call in an emergency instead of it dropping totally off the network at a future date when it can't make any sort of call. I'd have gone the other direction to give those customers more time. I recognise though that some people simply would not have done anything until they were forced to - no matter how much time they were given.
@Nath @Jumuta Networks made the commercial decision to ditch 3G years ago. But the legislation forcing them to block handsets due to 000 concerns is only a few weeks old.
The issue isn't that the handsets don't work on 4G or 5G, it's that some dropped down to 3G for emergency calls. So the networks have been told to even block some of the handsets they sold as "4G".
This is quite a misleading way of framing the communication. The telcos were clear about 3G phones no longer working many months ago, but it has not been clear at all which 4G phones would be blocked. Communication about this second problem only started recently and even then it was very unclear. Blaming consumers for not throwing out their new phones when they are receiving mixed messages over whether they will continue work is hardly a rational position.
But that Spectrum being used for 3G is beneficial. Not just for support of older devices but also increased, redundant coverage.
This purely Corporate Welfare legislation, which is going to backfire on the corporations when they realise they have to build more infrastructure to provide the same coverage.
It is going to be detrimental to product consumers because they won’t have the same amount of coverage. Also, the higher bandwidth of 5G is going to increase backhaul requirements which mean that the person calling 000 using VoLTE will need to compete with the person steaming 4K Netflix while playing CoD.
The only winners in the long-term will be the advertisers and data miners, who somehow manage to bloat a 4kB website to 40mB.