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Customers suddenly find their new phones can't make calls or send texts (www.abc.net.au)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 94 points 5 days ago (31 children)

This isn't regulatory. It's Optus deciding that if they didn't sell the handset or its foreign bought it is will be blocked. Because of reasons...

And don't ask questions because software is hard, and telecom is too technical for the plebs.

It's nothing but a blatant cash grab hidden in a thin veneer of technical babble because it's tough for modern journalists to question engineering.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 5 days ago (26 children)

Just days ahead of the shutdown, Australia's media regulator ACMA finalised a new "direction" (basically a rule) that meant telecom companies had to refuse service to all phones that relied on 3G for making emergency calls.

The idea was to prevent people from mistakenly believing that phones were fully working, only to realise they were unable to make emergency calls when the crucial moment came.

Australians with older 4G phones may also be caught out because of the way the phones are configured.

It is up to the telcos to work out which phones are affected, notify the owners, block their phones, and help make other arrangements such as low- or no-cost replacement phones.

However, as Telstra and Optus noted during a Senate inquiry into the shutdown, telecom companies are unable to tell which individual devices suffer from this problem unless have they sold them.

I'm not saying it's not partly on the providers, but validating that a bunch of obscure phones that aren't sold in your country meet new regulatory requirements is not as easy as you're making it out to be.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago (8 children)

So to let people know that they won't have emergency service during an emergency, they prevent them from having ANY service now (24-hour notice). Even if telecom companies behaved perfectly (which they wouldn't) the initial idea was already a problem.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You'd think they'b be able to... I dunno... SMS them about the problem, instead of cutting the service they pay for?

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