PHONE DISSERVICE

I probably said it already, but for a technology that defines 
modern living, it is incredible how much trouble I have with the 
mobile phone network. Both keeping a phone in the car for 
emergencies working, and for my home internet access via a USB 
modem.

Some examples:

* The 4G mobile broadband modem I use is again dropping back and 
forth between 3G and 4G, often with months of 3G-only followed by 
weeks of 4G reception.

* I thought that was due to it not supporting the lower 700MHz 
(B28) 4G frequency band adopted by Telstra after it was made, but I 
had a chance to try one of the Nokia dumb phones which supported 
all the current Telstra frequencies and it was going down to zero 
bars on 4G too. Except it wasn't smart enough to fall back to 3G at 
that point, and actually did drop out during calls until it was 
manually set to 2G/3G only mode. Bloody hopeless!

* So far I've mainly used Telstra-branded devices, locked to the 
Telstra network. Unlocked options are particularly limited for USB 
mobile broadband modems. These have always worked with network 
re-sellers using the Telstra network, which I use for my emergency 
phone SIM because one is much cheaper for long-expiry credit than 
Telstra themselves. Now it seems Telstra have changed it so that 
their new locked phones don't work unless you're actually a Telstra 
customer, even if you're still trying to use Telstra's physical 
phone network. Of course this wasn't stated publicly, just by 
roumor online. Apparantly it might not apply to Boost, which is 
owned by Telstra, but Belong won't work, even though it's also 
owned by Telstra. So I basically need a completely unlocked 4G 
phone now, and the cheapest of those are Nokias, and for them see 
above.

* Activating Telstra SIM cards used to be possible from a device 
using the unactivated SIM card to access the internet. It's still 
possible to browse the Telstra website before activation, but the 
activation pages pull in lots of external scripts, and Telstra are 
obviously too dumb to whitelist the hosts of them too, so it fails. 
But not at the start, right at the end after you've already filled 
in all the information. Not a proper error message either, the 
usual dim-witted "there's a problem" bullshit. Try too many times, 
eg. to try and find out what scripts to allow through NoScript, and 
it suddenly refuses to do the ID verification because you've used 
up a hidden limit on the number of tries over an unknown period. 
Plus they want to send damn email verification codes now. Bloody 
bastard website developers!

* Long term readers might remember my solution to Telstra turning 
off their page to view remaining internet data for a SIM card 
(2021-05-15USSD_Browsing.txt). I was worried it probably wouldn't 
work once 3G was turned off. Apparantly there's some sort of 
IP-based USSD emulation thing that telcos can use on 4G, but I 
don't think the modem I've got supports that. But it turns out 
that's irrelevent because about six weeks ago the familiar, but 
previously transient, error when I tried to read the remaining data 
balance using USSD, became a constant. Then for about a month I'm 
just geting nothing back from USSD requests at all. Not even for 
the menu showing options (of which the balance was the only 
remaining useful one anyway). Telstra has obviously just turned it 
off. Without any announcement, of course. So now I'm reduced to 
guessing my data usage like driving a car with a broken fuel guage. 
I did expect I'll need to set up data metering on my OpenWrt router 
before 3G went away, but suddenly that's become a job I need to do 
now.

What a damn pain in the neck it all is! In many ways the mobile 
network is my bridge to society, even providing my way to make 
money via the internet in order to buy things at the shops in town. 
It says a lot that just maintaining that bridge is driving me more 
crazy by the day. Next year letter delivery services are being cut 
back to every other day, so even the alternatives are going away.

At least there is still an old copper line to a weathered old POTS 
phone exchange running to this house, for so longs as its 
increasingly-scratchy relays last. Probably still compatible with 
old rotary pulse-dial telephones, and in my case connected to an 
abandoned rental Telstra Touchfone that's likely older than me. 
Given how things went trying to get tyre quotes online, that may 
still be the best way to do some things anyway, as much as I hate 
trying to scribble notes down while people talk. What a silly world.

 - The Free Thinker