In short:
Regional and rural Australians say their ability to make phone calls has dramatically reduced since the 3G network was switched off in October.
Telstra and Optus shut down 3G to boost the 4G and 5G networks, claiming customer coverage would benefit as a result.
What’s next:
The federal government says there may be a need for regulatory intervention if the situation does not improve.
My phone doesn’t receive half of its incoming calls. I actually narrowed it down to the VoLTE keepalive packets being transmitted with a MAC address of 00:00:00:00:00:00 when on CLAT (which is Telstra default) on all Google Pixels. The connection silently dies, there is no return UDP route, so the phone won’t ring.
I reported it to Google, but they don’t give a shit. I guess the million or so people with a pixel can just deal with it.
It was falling back to 3G when it happened before. That’s not going to happen now.
<sarcasm> Have you tried buying a new Pixel, and throwing your old one into landfill?</sarcasm>
BuT tHe PiXeL iS a PrEmIuM pHoNe, LiKe ThE iPhOnE!
Google will always treat their users as the product, no matter how much you pay for their hardware.
I replicated the same problem on a newer pixel. I suspect it’s all of them.
It is a shame that there are no other premium Android Phones that are just a handheld internet communicator. Samsungs are so full of corruptive “I want to be iPhone” bloatware that they make the Chinese phones look appealing, the Chinese phones are so full of nationalist spyware that they make Linux Phones look like a valid option (even though they are also manufactured by Chinese companies) Xperia is also full of their proprietary software, Nokia is probably the best of a bad bunch.
They’re all too bloated. I would not purchase a handset unless I could install GrapheneOS or LineageOS on it.