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.
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