PHONY PHONE SERVICE So last week 3G mobile phone reception finally went away where I live, a little after the official Australian turn-off date at the beginning of the month. Now it's only 4G and 5G, and 4G reception, in spite of claims, is proving worse than 3G. My father now can't make calls inside his house because the signal drops out, although funnily enough my old mobile broadband modem which doesn't support the new lower 4G frequency band has still been getting reception. That might be luck though since in the past it's gone for months with consistent 4G and then had a week or two of only seeing 3G signal, so I still need to get my antenna finished (annoyingly the second-hand antenna signal meter I've got for adjusting it won't work now because it was 3G as well - I didn't think it could take me this many years to get things finished). I documented my original plans for buying a replacement phone to keep in the car in my post 2023-06-10Facing_4G.txt. In spite of my best efforts to understand all the complex compatibility requirements, I was on completely the wrong track and ended up buying a phone that wouldn't work with my telco (even though it was branded the same as the one I was already using!). I can't do phones, somehow even though I know about the theory of the electronics that work them and the code that crafts them, they've managed to make such a compatibility nightmare that I just can't get my head around it. Not of course helped by the fact that, in this wonderful age of universal information access, I can't find out any damn thing! Frequencies, network locking, VoLTE support, it's like pulling teeth to find them out for the phones, and the telcos themselves are just brick walls about what they're doing. Today, thirteen days after the switch-off date, after I've already got my second 4G phone, I read this article published the day before: https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/australias-3g-shutdown-why-your-4g5g-phone-is-now-blocked,19159 ------------------------------------------------------------------- The ACMA, department and industry have decided not to properly address the compatibility issues and will instead now require people to only use "supported" handsets purchased directly from their telcos or associated handset partners. With this policy change, consumers can now no longer use any device they want from any provider in the world, even if it may work perfectly. The telcos get to solely decide what phones you are allowed to use and where you must have purchased them from. Optus blocking officially supported devices Due to the failures by Optus during the 8 November 2023 outage, in early September, the company began instigating a very regressive device-blocking policy. In essence, if Optus (or its partners) didn't sell a phone or test it, it would be blocked, even if it's a supported hardware model. Optus is even blocking officially supported phones that are on its device support list. If the phone was not purchased from Optus but another telco, it's blocked, even if it's also a supported model with that other telco. Phones are being denied all services based on the Type Allocation Code (TAC) section of the device serial number (International Mobile Equipment Identity, IMEI) and not the actual real-world functionality. Even identical otherwise perfectly compatible models are blocked if purchased from another telco or retailer. Even some brand-new phones recently purchased in major retail stores here have been blocked by Optus and the telcos, those customers are currently without any 4G service. ------------------------------------------------------------------- On the justification that some 4G phones run software that's programmed to switch to 3G for emergency calls, the government regulator is now requiring telcos to block phones they don't specifically approve, based on their IMEI. Not just from calls, but data and SMS as well (so it seems I'm lucky a second time that my old 4G mobile broadband modem is still working on Telstra). ACMA, the Australian government's communications/media authority (also known for blocking public access to random websites it doesn't like) is now purposefully overseeing a monopoly on phone sales by our three telcos. If I find a niche phone that someone has diligently designed to work on the network frequencies in Australia, it apparantly won't work unless my telco has it on their whitelist. There's also no hope of me resuming my early plans to make a phone myself (though I was looking at 2G then so that wouldn't have lasted past 2018). When do I find this out? Almost two weeks _after_ 3G is turned off, so yet another way I could have ended up buying a 4G phone that didn't work: It could support the frequencies, VoLTE, and be unlocked, yet get blocked by the telco because it's not a model they've whitelisted (for Optus maybe even if it's on their public device support list, apparantly). I was looking as hard as I could into all this stuff and nowhere did I read about this until that article was forwarded to me today by my father, who vocally hates computers and doesn't like to make any attempt to understand the technical details of these sorts of things. I mean, I give up, I really do. This is the one, _the_ _one_, piece of technology that the world is obsessed with, from the poorest countries of Africa to the top towers of New York, and I just can't get a grip on anything about it. Except the fact that it's clearly all a complete rip off from head to toe. - The Free Thinker