You have probably seen the news about GSM AKA 2G mobile phone support going away, today is the end day for Telstra GSM.
You probably think (like I did) that any 3G phone will do, but that's not the case. The Samsung Galaxy S and the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10i don't support 3G in the 850MHz speed and Telstra specifically states that they don't provide full coverage on phones that only support 2100MHz. I wanted to give one of my old phones to a relative who only makes phone calls (no games or Internet use) so one of those 2 phones would have worked nicely except that he lives in one of those areas where Telstra doesn't support those speeds. As you apparently need 850MHz to get Telstra 3G (including Aldi and other Telstra resellers) in Melbourne suburbs a lot of older 3G phones will suddenly stop being usable. I don't know if Optus and Vodafone will have similar issues. It's possible that they could as Vodafone supports 3 bands including 850MHz and could possibly have some areas that are only well covered at 850MHz-3G and GSM speeds. Optus supports 900MHz and 2100MHz for 3G (which I think are more common frequencies) but there are some 3G phones which don't support 900MHz such as the Xperia X10a (which was sold by Telstra). If you bought a 3G phone from Optus/Virgin a few years ago (as I did with the Galaxy S and XperiaX10i) it might not be usable now on the Telstra network. If you bought a 3G phone from Telstra a few years ago if might not be usable on Optus depending on how they do things (which might not be well known for a few months). I've just given away my Galaxy S to someone who wants to use it as a security camera. I encourage anyone with Android phones in such situations to give them to the LUV hardware library. Even 5yo Android phones are nice little embedded Linux systems that can be used for running your own programs. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list luv-main@luv.asn.au https://lists.luv.asn.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/luv-main
