#Telstra

[ultramaga]

I have a 4G phone. Until recently, the phone company - Telstra - didn't have a problem with that. Then I received a text message telling me that they were blocking me, because I don't have a VOLTE phone. Despite them advertising that they were 'upgrading' to 4G only - i.e. LTE. So what's the difference? I live in a remote area, with poor coverage. VOLTE is more vulnerable to disruption, but is a lot cheaper for phone companies to run. It's worse for customers, unless they are living in the city and there's no crisis. So I - like a lot of poorer Australians - don't live in the city. I'm really unimpressed at being forced to buy a new phone so that they can make more money, and then potentially find that my calls won't connect, or drop out when they do. Telstra was founded by tax money, and is in a weird sort of public/private space, but they are best understood as a monopoly with token competition. If you don't use Telstra in areas like mine, then you can't use a phone. The government required me to have a phone 24/7 and to be on call as I am a disabled pensioner waiting for housing. It told me that if I don't answer the phone when they call, they give the housing to someone else. So it's a big deal, and I have no choice, and I have to add this to the laundrey list of reasons I fvcking despise the government, and yes, I'm aware that only around 1% of the government are actually people you can vote for.

[nando161mando]

If you are still using prepaid, tesltra are offering a free recharge if you apply for it - Australia

[reblogalanaartdream]

Being as I have Telstra as my mobile/ internet 🛜 I had no idea half of Australia’s internet 🛜 was down until guy who use to host giggle & hoots show did a skit about it on TikTok before the news could tell me about it

[jodjuya]

>be me

>Make a phone call this morning

>Get a Telstra robovoice beforehand saying "ur phone is about to be disconnected because we're about to turn off 3g"

>am very confused. Phone is 5g phone, why is it getting disconnected???

>check Telstra website. Says to SMS "3" to 3498 to check ur phone.

>results say: "yeah boy, go buy urself a new phone"

>more confusion, because for real this is a *5g phone* using a *4g SIM card*, so Telstra wtf are you talking about???

>investigate further. Oh... maybe it's this?

>investigate *further* further. Find some nerds giving very complicated instructions for how to fix that:

>follow instructions. Get new "VoLTE" icon on status bar as described:

>🥳

>(for completeness, find the script for how to place test calls to 000, so that I can do that when September comes):

I guess if anyone wants to upgrade their elderly phone for cheap, go hit up Facebook marketplace for folks selling off their "disconnected" phones that they've been scared into needlessly upgrading from...

Though I would hope that anyone using a carrier-provided handset has received an OTA update to remedy that "hArDwiREd to uSe 3G fOr eMErGEnCy cAlLs" issue.

I don't have a carrier-provided handset so I guess that's why I slipped that particular lasso... 🤔

[shadowofthebells]

Telstra. Your hold music is going to make me kill myself. If you know people are going to be on hold for up to an hour why don’t you have a playlist that spans that hour instead of playing the same fifteen second song six thousand times on repeat? Every time it ends it’s like oh good it’s over and then it immediately starts again! ARGH!!

[veggiefritterz]

[ibeattheinternet]

Who would've thought Vodafail could be looked back with nostalgia

[colitcomedia]

Explore the latest ASX 200 trends: Tuesday’s rebound faces hurdles despite positive Wall Street gains. Insights on expected market dips, rising oil prices, and stock opportunities like Pro Medicus and Telstra.

[streetphotographypics]

Old Post Office and Telstra phone box in Charlton Victoria.

[adreamthatsworthkeeping]

Telstra's new ads remind me of Creature Comforts.

[katsen13]

The real tragedy here is the cat didn’t get breakfast on time. 😂

If you're in Australia you'll already know this, but for our international readers, basically the whole of Australia ground to a halt today because one of our two mobile/internet networks - Optus - just completely shat its dacks for about 9 hours, taking out the country's phones, internet and banking.

The funniest part though, is that apparently when the national broadcaster tried to reach out to find out what was going on - they discovered the quite forseeable problem that everyone at Optus used Optus for their phone and internet, so there was basically no way for their company to contact anyone inside or outside the company to work out what was going on or to try and fix it.

What a country.

[almosttenaciousmoon]

is telstra being stupid again or is it just my modem?

[jodjuya]

5 days to go until the Telstra 3g shutdown.

I have a replacement phone standing by, yet am still stubbornly playing chicken by using my existing phone right up until the very end.

Got another set of messages from my provider, Exetel, this afternoon. Their final warning of the impending shutdown.

Nothing in there about my phone being proactively banned from the network, only that it has been identified as incompatible, and that if it doesn't have VoLTE compatibility, "it will not be able to make voice calls on our network"

So I'm holding onto the tiniest glimmer of hope that they won't be doing full on approved-devices-only whitelisting after the shutdown, like the other major telcos have on the cards, but maybe this is simply slapdash messaging on their part and I will get booted in five days regardless of my phone actually connecting with VoLTE. Bloody nerve-wracking and it shouldn't be. Christ this is one hell of a mishandled kerfuffle.

Their SMS is a lot more direct about things though. No hedging qualifiers there, just NO CALLS FOR YOU!

[andthebubbles]

internet's doing great today

loading the dash be like 'image' 'image' 'image' and eventually the image may or may not appear

[nostalgiainpages]

Dolly Mag March 2009

Petition to bring back phones with finesse! Hiptop phones and the O.G fuchsia Motorola Razr Flip's need a proper resurgence as they were. None of this modernizing them by giving us a smart phone similar to what we already have with a function to change the screen to look like the old version. Oh no. I want an actual anniversary phone that functions like the older version and I fuckin want it now!