Today marks the end of an era, with the country's main telcos turning off their 3G networks. They've been preparing to switch the system off since 2019 and have delayed the official shutdown twice this year to allow affected customers more time to upgrade their devices.
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00:00A lot of 3G phones, and other devices as well, watches, some iPads, I've got a few in the
00:08cupboard there, the old ones.
00:10Lifts, I only heard about this last week, but the emergency phone in lifts are often
00:16connected to 3G.
00:17I imagine a lot of work's been done on that, but there may be some that still won't work.
00:22Mobile phone boosters, a lot of vehicles in regional areas have got these big antennas
00:26on the front, and a device inside, and there's 300,000 of those, according to industry groups.
00:32Maybe 100,000 of those might need upgrading with a new antenna.
00:36And lots of farm equipment, farmers use the 3G signal, they might have a weather station
00:40or a channel monitored to measure the water levels, or the water levels in a tank, there's
00:45a million bits of equipment on farms that use 3G.
00:48And a lot of work's been done to change that over, but there could be quite a few things
00:52that might stop working as these 3G signals are shut down.
00:55Some of the people on the front line will be people in regional areas, like in the cities,
00:59we're all using 4G and 5G now anyway, but in the bush, particularly in remote areas,
01:05people will be left out hanging on a limb.
01:07And New South Wales farmers came out this morning again, just saying, please don't leave
01:12anyone behind.
01:13But people will be left behind, because some farmers, for example, or people living in
01:18remote areas, will be getting what they call a fortuitous signal, right, they're not on
01:23their coverage map, but they're still getting 3G and they've been using it for years.
01:27But Telstra is not promising to provide a signal for them after this 3G shutdown occurs.
01:32The 4G signal doesn't travel as far.
01:34And in some places where they've been upgrading the towers with 4G, people are experiencing
01:39a worsening of their service, because they've got these antennas pointing in a certain area,
01:44maybe they've adjusted it slightly to pick up a bigger population base.
01:48And so people are experiencing all sorts of changes while this transition goes.
01:53But I do worry, because sometimes people don't check their mail, or they may not have
01:58understood that it affects them.
02:00The majority of people in Australia don't actually know which network their telephone
02:05is on.
02:07And the black spots in rural, remote and regional Australia are much larger than they would
02:11be in the city.
02:13So it does affect people, people with disabilities and the ageing population definitely will
02:20be affected by it if they haven't already changed over.
02:25And it really relies on somebody assisting them, or letting them know how they can change over.
02:32That's Susie Tegan from the National Rural Health Alliance.
02:35And she made quite a strong plea that if you're a family member of someone elderly, or who's
02:39not great with technical equipment anyway, help them out in this period, because they're
02:43going to need some help to figure out how to buy a new fall alarm, or to deal with a new phone.
02:48This has been coming for five years now.
02:51And particularly in the last year, you know they've had to delay this a couple of times.
02:56Because the more we dig in, the more things that we find that are reliant on the old 3G.
03:00So Telstra says they've sent out four million text messages in the course of this year to
03:06any phone that might not work once 3G is shut down.
03:09Now there's actually, any old 3G only phones, you would have had a text message saying your
03:14service is not going to work.
03:16But there's also maybe a hundred or more thousand phones that people have bought overseas,
03:22or they bought it from an overseas website, or they bought it second hand here in Australia.
03:27They might have done it just recently, and they might have spent a lot of money.
03:30But a lot of those phones that potentially won't make an emergency call, now this network
03:36is shutting down, they've been required to stop those phones working.
03:41So that's a bit of a consumer issue really, and there's quite a large number of them.
03:46And I think what we've heard from the authorities this week is that they will continue to allow
03:51some of those phones to make their 3G emergency calls for a period of time.
03:56Telstra's going to shut down their network over the course of a week, and Optus will
03:59take a few months.
04:00So there is a bit of a leeway anyway, but you're going to have to do something if you've
04:04got any of those devices.
04:06So if you are affected like this, you have to do something, where do you go for help?
04:09Well, you can go to your telco I suppose, but really this is all about who sold you
04:13the device.
04:14If it's a health device, and there are lots of devices in your bodies as well, or if it's
04:19a lift or if it's a car booster, you've got to go to the company that sold you that equipment,
04:25and they should be able to help you with an upgrade, or sometimes just tweaking the system.
04:29Sometimes you only have to change your settings so it's not defaulting to 3G, it will pick
04:33up the new networks.