This has been handled differently in the UK from a regulatory point of view from an earlier time in the rollout of 4G/5G networks, so things seem to have worked out better.

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.

Last minute change, and leaving it up to the carriers. Bad to the power of bad.

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.

It’s surprising the things that have been caught offguard by this.

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...

Australia has a rich tradition of overarching, arrogant and authoritarian behavior towards the little people.

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.

Well, i have to say that is one area where Germany actually shines. We shut off the stupid, power-hungry and slow 3G, but kept 2G as a basic service. That was a very good decision. All data comms can switch to 4G/5G, while voice comm can remain on 2G as backup. Low data rate devices can also use 2G/GPRS/EC-GSM.

James is doing an incredible job of documenting this issue.

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.

It's interesting to see the opinions/comments on this story (now and over the last months). The comments here are not immune but are admirably more interesting and thoughtful. Most online discussions about the shutdown tend to spiral into a government overreach / nanny state narrative. Not everything has to be explained in terms of big government, but claiming the problems associated with the shutdown are a symptom of government overreach is simply wrong. The industry has been allowed to do as they like for decade/s.

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.

I have always maintained that VoLTE has been a deficiently-defined specification, with many, many reliability concerns whisked away in the name of VoIP (which is what LTE is). It is possible to design an IP-based system capable of actual tolerance, but with the VoLTE spec so underdefined for years, these issues crop up badly.

(RCS has essentially the same problems until Google essentially monopolized it... which creates a big single-point failure problem on its own.)

I was forced to give up my beloved OnePlus 6 barely eighteen months after buying it when AT&T shut down 3G and moved to a whitelist scheme where any phone not allowed was forbidden. I'd just moved my family off Verizon for the same reason, too.

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.

If phone companies are whitelisting phone models this is an issue that won't be solved anytime soon. Maybe with one of the next generations of mobile phone standards.

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?

It was unsurprising the MP did not understand the problem, I've never had an exchange with an MP or a representative of an MP that didn't require 5 meetings, the basics explained ELI5, and even then any kind of action was too much work.

I have given up on politicians having any use at all.

Okay. 3G is pretty good. No doubt about it. But from a security perspective (which I suspect is what's driving this), I think 4/5G are better. Like many instances in security, supporting legacy devices is not a desirable outcome for the security of the network as a whole.

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.

How does this affect data-only devices such as modems? I don't have the IMEI unfortunately so I can't check until later with the online checker, but I have a Netgear LB2120 that I bought online (not from a carrier), it's only data and SMS, so not intended to make calls. I only use it at events (three or four weeks of the year) so haven't tried since the switch-off.

I'm going to be very pretty pissed if this is blocked because of a stupidly-drafted law...

I live in the US and have never heard of a phone that uses a different technology for emergency calls vs. normal calls. Why is this? Is it worldwide?

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.

If you have ever worked for an Australian telco, you were not surprised at all that they would bork this planned shutdown.

I had not been across this issue but wow this article is enlightening.

It makes sense that new rules should apply to newly made/sold phones. Why not grandfather existing phones? Isn't any communication better than none in an emergency? A working phone, even if it doesn't support placing official emergency calls, would still be able to place a phone call for help. Even sending an email or WhatsApp message is better than nothing.

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.

Hugh Jeffrey's video[1] on this block demonstrates the phones might be blocked, though it seems to vary depending on phone, and which telco's SIM. Often it can block one SIM from working, whilst a similar SIM will work in slot 2. or vice versa. Or they are both blocked after rebooting. Or maybe not.

[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.

> the shutdown is supposed to usher in a new age of modern high speed communications to power the modern 4G & 5G

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?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPlTz-3estM also looks at some experiences

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...

> Now on paper this may sound like a reasonable idea

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.

I wonder if you can circumvent this by changing your IMEI to a range of one of the supported models?

It's kinda hard to do these days though..

Not good for dumbphone enjoyers. I specifically bought a sonim xp3 because it had 4g + VoLTE. It's all very confusing, but it sounds like it won't work when I land back in Australia, regardless of whether I'm willing to switch networks.

It's funny that if its going to affect anyone's revenue they deal with it swiftly, ie all the smart meters got a prompt upgrade.

If its going to fuck over the public no one gives a shit.

And this is why self regulation by for profit companies cannot work, in case we needed yet another test to verify.

> What people also don’t understand is that these compatibility issues with VoLTE Calling and Emergency Calling are Software Problems, not hardware issues.

> […]

> 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.

I don't understand why voice calls aren't just a standard and required part of the 4g and 5g specifications?? Did they really design and implement 4g and 5g assuming 3g would never be shut down, ever?

Can these blocked phones make phone calls over VoWiFi?

For well over a century from the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1905 through to AM broadcasting, to the aborted introduction of FM broadcasting in the 1940s through to installing television in the international FM band as well as in an international satellite band and also on frequencies prone to sporadic E-layer propagation Australia has screwed up radiocommunications big-time.

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.

Already full 4G IPv6 here, even on dumb mobile phones.

Nothing to shutdown.

3G is prime infrastructure, it has huge range and like the article states could be used for emergency calls.

Capitalism ho!

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