Stacey Storrier was told she was “lucky” that she received mobile phone service at her home in the New South Wales Riverina region.
But when Telstra’s 3G network is switched off on 30 June, that luck will run out.
The Hillston farmer is concerned for the safety of her family and neighbours if coverage is expanded to fill the gap.
“It’s just the health and safety of people that work on your properties and that live in regional Australia,” she said. “If something happens and you can’t make a phone call to ambulance, it can be the difference between life and death.”
Australia’s three main telecommunications companies have been steadily upgrading 3G towers with 4G and 5G for several years and claim to have managed the transition to ensure minimal disruption. Vodafone has already switched off its 3G network and Optus will switch off in September 2024. Just 2% of all mobile services in Australia in 2023 used 3G, according to federal government data, while 63% use 4G and 85% use 5G.
According to the official coverage maps, Storrier had never received any mobile phone service. So when Telstra upgraded its local tower to 5G and her 3G service dropped off, there was no recourse.
“Telstra said that the maps they had showed that we should never have got coverage … so they couldn’t do anything about it,” Storrier said. “They said we were just lucky.”
Even when the 4G and 5G network exists, the changeover carries a significant cost to farmers. Many older mobile phones and automated farming equipment are not built to support 4G.
Storrier has had to purchase new equipment, including a telemetry for cattle troughs, which prevents remote troughs from overflowing, “because once the 3G service got switched off they would not work any more, and they didn’t have the capacity to upgrade”.
Her main concern is not the upgrades but the ability to access any network at all.
Chris McIntosh lives in Deepwater, less than 10 minutes off the New England Highway on the NSW northern tablelands. He is lucky to get a bar of signal.
“Local mobile towers are regularly congested,” he said. “The available bandwidth gets used up quickly, slowing speeds to barely-usable.”
Caitlin James lives in Coolah in central west NSW. The only spot she can get phone signal is on top of the hill. She relies on the 3G network to send messages to family members who have internet access but no phone signal.
“If something happens up the hill that they need to know, my best bet is contacting them via 3G because they have wifi in the house but not phone coverage,” she said. “So I can contact them by internet.”
A Griffith University lecturer, Dr Amber Marshall, is an expert in rural digital inclusion. She said that, on paper, Telstra’s shutdown of its 3G network should not leave any customers behind. The telco has promised to match or exceed existing 3G coverage with 4G or 5G.
“There could be interruptions to service when things get turned off, and new things get turned on, because that’s kind of the nature of technology,” she said. “But it’s not the intent that consumers that were in coverage or had service won’t have it any more.”
She urged businesses to switch over Eftpos machines and other payment systems to wifi ahead of time, to avoid disruption. Loss of Eftpos was one of the main points of disruption during the nationwide Optus outage last November, she said.
Telcos are required to upgrade base stations to ensure they maintain contracted network coverage levels as technology changes, the acting communications minister, Mark Dreyfus, told Guardian Australia.
The RMIT associate professor Mark Gregory said there was no guarantee the coverage area would remain the same through the transition.
“With the 4G spectrum, if you were using the same antennas with the same transmit power, the same energy, then the footprint for 4G should be bigger than 3G,” he said.
“But we’re not using the same antennas. So therefore, there is no guarantee that the footprint will be the same or bigger. It will be come down to a case-by-case, tower-by-tower basis.”
Telstra’s regional general manager, Chris Taylor, said there would be no impact to the 3G network until 30 June, at which point the “entire network will be shut down” at once. “The plan is not to have just some coverage in some places and a staggered closure,” he said.
