3G Shutdown: All fun and games until someone dies

I want to introduce you to my neighbour, Alf. He's about 70-ish, a bit of a rogue, and hands me hot cross buns to eat every so often because he can't. (I don't eat them either, but I haven't got the heart to tell him.)

The other week, he knocked on my door in a flutter. Alf, in his usual devil-may-care style, asked me: "Do you know anything about this f--ken 3G, 4G bullshit?" He pointed to his crusty old Android phone; what vintage it was I couldn't tell you.

I told him I knew about it all too well. As a user of a Sony Xperia 1 III (XQ-BC72) I was told my fully capable 4G/5G phone was incompatible with the shutdown, and I'd need to buy a new one. I'm a bit of a connoisseur with Android, you see. I also tend to back losers despite their great features (HTC One M7, HTC 10, LG G7 ThinQ, and now the Sony.) I thought having a 5G capable handset and MicroSD card capability would have this thing running until it fell apart.

Nope, not so. Despite pleading my case until I was blue in the face, Telstra (rather its MVNO Belong) said my phone (rather, its IMEI) was on a blacklist and there was nothing I could do. Which is what I told Alf. He had to buy a new phone.

"Are you f--kin' serious?" he said. "I only make calls and text, I don't need another f--kin' phone." No Alf, in a fair world, you wouldn't. But the government says so, therefore you do. (Typical Australia: where if it isn't banned, it's mandatory.)

Then I thought about people just like Alf and his cohort. 4.6 million of them, or 16% of the population. The government says about 740,000 devices are affected; but I think that's a rather conservative estimate.

If I didn't tell him how the 3G shutdown would effect him, he could have slipped on something, suffered a heart attack, and died because he could no longer call 000, even though his fingers could physically dial the number.

Thinking of other vulnerable older people in the same boat, cut adrift from the 3G network, it will be an inevitability that someone will die because they tried to call 000 and could not. A morbid thought; but if something as critical as 000 is unreachable to any segment of the population, tragedy will follow.

As for me, I make calls every day. Since about April this year, I got an IVR message at the beginning of every call saying that my phone would no longer work come October 28th (I thankfully kept my G7 and can use that for the time being, despite being an older model.) If an elderly person seldom made calls and aren't ardent web surfers, who knows if they knew this was all happening in the first place?

All this so telcos can buy up rights to pieces of the EM spectrum through auctions - and the government can profit and fill their ever emptying coffers.

What irks me is the government and telcos rigid approach to it all. It's going to brick devices that are fully capable of VoLTE (Voice over LTE, or 4G) and 5G that some people have come to depend on and now have to get rid of - I'm not talking about Alf's old blower, I'm talking about recent devices that still have plenty of life left in them.

As for Alf, I'll have to take him phone shopping at some point so he can feel safe in his own home again.

And all this during a cost-of-living crisis, where a new phone not just for Alf, but for many, is a a luxury.