3G network to close

Gundog · Guru

3G network to close

Magnarc · Guru

We have just got a 5G wireless modem on a Telstra plan that costs $120 a month. What a performance!

I was asked for my DoB four times, my address twice, but the height of idiocy was the request to allow them to do a financial check on me. I have been a Telstra customer for nine years and never missed a payment.

Breakdown:

28 minutes waiting to get through.

A further 20 minutes to complete the transaction.

Then the crowing glory! When the modem is delivered install it yourself.

Modem is about the size of my Iphone has a touch screen that is just short of an inch and a half square, so you can imagine how big the writing is. I was told to power up the battery which would take about three hours, then switch it on and it would automatically connect. Guess what? Yep you are correct, it didn't. A password is needed. After getting on to the makers site I find out that the password is in the bloody modem, you have to scroll til you find it.

Just to round off the day we decided to watch a movie on Netflix no can do. Smart tv can't find the Internet! Yes I know, I should have realised that everything had to be reset but I plead guilty your worship on the grounds of diminished responsibilty.

I have had better days folks.

Gundog · Guru

Magnarc wrote:
We have just got a 5G wireless modem on a Telstra plan that costs $120 a month. What a performance!
I was asked for my DoB four times, my address twice, but the height of idiocy was the request to allow them to do a financial check on me. I have been a Telstra customer for nine years and never missed a payment.
Breakdown:
28 minutes waiting to get through.
A further 20 minutes to complete the transaction.
Then the crowing glory! When the modem is delivered install it yourself.
Modem is about the size of my Iphone has a touch screen that is just short of an inch and a half square, so you can imagine how big the writing is. I was told to power up the battery which would take about three hours, then switch it on and it would automatically connect. Guess what? Yep you are correct, it didn't. A password is needed. After getting on to the makers site I find out that the password is in the bloody modem, you have to scroll til you find it.
Just to round off the day we decided to watch a movie on Netflix no can do. Smart tv can't find the Internet! Yes I know, I should have realised that everything had to be reset but I plead guilty your worship on the grounds of diminished responsibilty.
I have had better days folks.

Here's a litte tip for you.

All my devices that connect either the hotspot on my phone, the wifi router or the mobile router, all have the same Name ie. Kellies#1knockShop and Password ie 4aGood(.)(.)

All smart device connect automatically to the strongest signal available.

cell twr.jpg

Ass you can see from the above picture the 3g 885MHz is sharing the frequency with 5G , I have a 5G phone, and its 700mtrs to the the tower I am connected via Band 28 the 778MHz band, if I moved closes to the tower it possible I would eventually connect to 5G

Magnarc · Guru

Many thanks Gundog. That clarifies a few things for me.

Whenarewethere · Guru

My phone is 5G, never got 5G at home, inside or on the street. The phone is switched on for 5G, reset phone many times with the help of Telstra.

All calls revert to 3G probably because we are at the waters edge 1 km from Manly (Sydney), below the tower. The price for Sydney Harbour water front property one pays. Better service in the outback!

We did have 3 land lines up to a few years ago, phone, fax & internet all on separate lines. Now none, probably a mistake.

3G failed recently & spent 5+ hours on the phone with Telstra from an entirely different suburb which seems to work. They must have fixed 3G as it has been working again.

I will be buying a fleet or three of peogons before mid 2024!

Gundog · Guru

Whenarewethere wrote:
My phone is 5G, never got 5G at home, inside or on the street. The phone is switched on for 5G, reset phone many times with the help of Telstra.

All calls revert to 3G probably because we are at the waters edge 1 km from Manly (Sydney), below the tower. The price for Sydney Harbour water front property one pays. Better service in the outback!

We did have 3 land lines up to a few years ago, phone, fax & internet all on separate lines. Now none, probably a mistake.

3G failed recently & spent 5+ hours on the phone with Telstra from an entirely different suburb which seems to work. They must have fixed 3G as it has been working again.

I will be buying a fleet or three of peogons before mid 2024!

What is the model and brand of your phone, it important to match the phone to the available bands. Are you near Nth Steyne St or Central Ave ?

You could download an app called " Aus Phone Towers " and see what band you are connecting to, I see from tower locations around Manly thre are plenty within 500mtrs of each other, another explaination is the amount phones connecting could see towers overloaded and your being booted to another tower.

-- Edited by Gundog on Thursday 24th of August 2023 10:58:35 AM

Whenarewethere · Guru

Sony Xperia 10 iii.

Or smoke signals or 1900s physical mail delivery at 4 times a day.

My old phone used to state which tower you were connected to. Pretty much always Watsons Bay tower in the eastern suburbs (South Head, the other side of Sydney Heads)

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Gundog · Guru

Whenarewethere wrote:
Sony Xperia 10 iii.
My old phone used to state which tower you were connected to. Pretty much always Watsons Bay tower in the eastern suburbs (South Head, the other side of Sydney Heads)

Not wanting to know you exact location, but there are plenty of towers you couls connect to rather than the 3 at South Head.

Whilst Sony list it as a 5G phone it appears the high frequency bands are not listed, it could be the case that your phone is 5G ready but waiting for low and medium bands tobe converted to 5G. the only other issue I could suggest you are in an area where buildings around you are causing canyoning block the higher frequency band preventing connection, because around the Manly area there are plenty of towers with band 28, 778mhz Freq.

The only other issue I could explain the problem is Sony has a lower powered receiver. but I would suggest you download the aus phone towers app, if only to check where or what tower you are connecting to. Its a free app, try it then delete it if you have any security concerns. You can preview and see the lower locations around you on pc at ausphonetowers.com.au.

Mein · Senior Member

"All of them will stop working after the shutdown.

These include phones, eftpos machines, cars, tablets and security cameras."

Cars will stop working????

Déjà vu; Y2K!!!

Are We Lost · Guru

Mein wrote:
"All of them will stop working after the shutdown.
These include phones, eftpos machines, cars, tablets and security cameras."

Cars will stop working????

Déjà vu; Y2K!!!

This is unlike Y2K. In Y2K we had to examine the computer code to assess if it would handle the turn of the century and fix it if it would not.

In the case of switching off 3G, those cars that use 3G but not 4G (or 5G) will definitely not work.

But of course we are talking about the ability to communicate over the cellphone network. You didn't interpret that to mean "would not drive" did you?

Where I can see a few van owners may get caught out is if they have an older tracking device in the van. Until recently most of the cheaper ones sold worked on 3G only. I also still have a couple of 3G only mobile broadband modems ... not used for a long time, but maybe some people still do use them.

-- Edited by Are We Lost on Thursday 24th of August 2023 10:08:22 PM

Mein · Senior Member

This is unlike Y2K.

Oh! Okay! So, the linked report does not incorporate scaremongering such as occured in the lead up to Y2K, e.g., "Planes will fall out of the sky", "ATMs will stop functioning", "Widespread computer crashes in government departs and companies will occur."?

But of course we are talking about the ability to communicate over the cellphone network. You didn't interpret that to mean "would not drive" did you?

"All of them will stop working after the shutdown. These include phones, eftpos machines, cars, tablets and security cameras." - are definitive statements.

I think my post went over your head but YOU think that I've misunderstood. Never mind!

Gundog · Guru

Y2K was a hoax

It could easily disproven, by just going into BIOS and changing the clock to read 2355 hours on 31 December 1999, 6 minutes later the computer still worked all be it the date was wrong.

What cars have a 3G sim card in them to make the work, sure there are early devices that have 3G sims like trackers etc, those that are using them will know because they have to pay a service fee, I would suspect that it would be rare to find an ATM or EFT device operating off 3G.

Hardware designers have known since September 2019 that the 3G would shut down in 2024, we didn't have any BS stories when 1G, CDMA and 2G were shut down.

Are We Lost · Guru

Gundog, Y2K was not a hoax. It was very real, although the level of panic was a bit over the top (helped by the media). Your suggestion of changing the BIOS in a PC bears no resemblance to how a large corporation would have to deal with this in a production environment. Due to the complexities and interfacing with different systems the costs of doing this were huge.

I worked in the IT industry and was involved in many projects in the preceding years to deal with it. The company our contracting team was primarily working for (a large Telco) spent many millions of dollars to check and rectify their systems. With all the publicity at the time, a large organisation could not afford the risk of failure. Fortunately there were years to prepare, so a lot of the changes were implemented progressively as other system changes were developed. And I know there were systems that would have failed.

Every single application had to be checked to ensure no 6 digit date fields were in use, and corrected if they were. Otherwise going from 991231, the next day is 000101, 100 years in the past. Try that in a spreadsheet and see how the system handles it. No problem with the BIOS, but if the date was used in any calculation the spreadsheet would fail or give an incorrect result.

The result of all this work was that the bomb was defused. However because Armageddon did not happen, the misconception grew (helped by the media now taking the opposite view), that the Y2K risk was not an issue after all.

-- Edited by Are We Lost on Friday 25th of August 2023 12:08:24 PM

dorian · Guru

Some good ones here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

In South Korea:

a video store in Gwangju accidentally generated a late fee of approximately 8 million won (approximately $7,000 US dollars) because the store's computer determined a tape rental to be 100 years overdue.

In Germany:

a bank accidentally transferred 12 million Deutsche Marks (equivalent to $6.2 million) to a customer and presented a statement with the date 30 December 1899.

In Norway, a day care center for kindergarteners in Oslo offered a spot to a 105 year old woman because the citizen's registry only showed the last two digits of citizens' years of birth.

In Italy, courthouse computers in Venice and Naples showed an upcoming release date for some prisoners as 10 January 1900, while other inmates wrongly showed up as having 100 additional years on their sentences.

This one is very sad:

In Sheffield, United Kingdom, a Y2K bug that was not discovered and fixed until 24 May caused computers to miscalculate the ages of pregnant mothers, which led to 154 patients receiving incorrect risk assessments for having a child with Down syndrome. As a direct result two abortions were carried out, and four babies with Down syndrome were also born to mothers who had been told they were in the low-risk group.