With 65,000 still yet to upgrade, there are concerns they could be cut off from vital services. Telecommunications consultant Paul Budde explains why 3G is being switched-off.
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00:00We are using the mobile phone more and more and more, there are now 39 million mobile
00:07phones in use and we mainly use it for 90%, 99% for data and that requires an enormous
00:14amount of capacity that has to go through the network.
00:18Now the radio spectrum is used for that and the radio spectrum is channeled in particular
00:26blocks and in principle we need more blocks, if you talk about for example the landline
00:33you need bigger cables, now it's not the cable in the air of course, but you need more space
00:39in the radio spectrum to do that.
00:41So that's why we went from 3G to 4G to 5G, increasingly adding more spectrum to the mobile
00:49network but also using new technologies that use the spectrum more efficiently, so that's
00:55why we can't have any more 3G, that 3G spectrum now has to be used to satisfy the 39 million
01:03customers of the mobile network of which 99% are on either 4G or 5G at the moment.
01:12The government has done in informing people, making people aware and getting prepared for
01:18it.
01:20Yes, that's now roughly five years or three years that that has been happening, so in
01:26general basically all the businesses they have that responsibility of course to change
01:31their technology and most of them if not all have done that, they've had plenty of time
01:37to do that.
01:39The problem basically is with the approximately 100,000 users that are still on the old 3G
01:46network and both Optus and Telstra are providing free phones for the people that are still
01:52on the old, who still have these old phones.
01:55But it is very difficult to reach those last 100,000 people, perhaps some of those phones
02:00are simply in a drawer and are not used, of course others might be used by people that
02:06in one way or another have not been able to get the message.
02:10I always have indicated, you know, please use that the children, grandchildren, friends
02:16of elderly people, just ask these people if they have the right phone, help everybody.
02:23But you know, it looks like this is going to happen by the end of September, the end
02:28of the 3G network for Telstra in many cases will start.