3G network to be suspended

Life Technology
1

I know this sounds weird, but I’ve seen a video explaining that many 4G devices actually uses 3G networks to provide 4G speed, meaning that when this is done 4G phones will stop working, and you can’t even make calls on it.

Can someone explain to me if this means 4G phones will automatically become useless? Or does Taiwan use a different system (the video in question is from Australia, and they may use different standards, where 4G signals are carried over 3G network, meaning all 4G phones become useless once 3G network is shut down).

This is the video in question.

2

Yesterday I saw my phone connecting to 3G for the first time in probably a decade.

3

No, the problem is that a lot of 4g phones still use 3g as voice, and that means suspending 3g bricks your phone. You can’t call anyone with it.

I don’t know how it will be addressed because there’s a lot of 4g phones out there.

It’s a problem because if you need to make an emergency call it won’t work.

4

Do you know what bricking actually means?

4 Likes
5

As a person that is openly ignorant about this stuff, I am also curious to learn more. I have been told this type of story from the phone company for many years now as well. But things still work. Albeit my land lines no longer work (2g).

Is there some website that has a good primer for the dumb on this topic? :saluting_face:

6

It might as well be bricked because it will be useless as a phone.

And 4g devices aren’t that old.

7

You might be the only one in the country that uses their phone as a phone. Regardless, If the phone functions, it is not ‘bricked’. So please don’t spread such misinformation.

If a phone doesn’t support VoLTE, which are only limited to the earliest models of 4G phones as most modern phones sold within the last several years support VoLTE, then it will still happily work with everyone’s favourite app to make calls, LINE.

Maybe I should get an unsupported phone. Maybe then the scam calls might finally stop.

The 4G devices you describe are over 10 years old now too.

1 Like
8

If the device is functional, it’s not bricked.

9

TL;DR: Not ALL 4G phones, but just those that don’t support VoLTE (2008-2016-ish phones, newer 4G-capable AND VoLTE phones will still work).

I was an RF Engineer for 3.5 years in the US before coming to Taiwan. Without looking at some parameters about Taiwan’s networks or even the full video, I’d have to look up how it’s implemented here.

In the US, it was fair to say that UMTS, CDMA 2000, HSPA, etc. (subsets of 3G tech) were pretty much dead except for a few industrial niches that received plenty of warning to switch over or announce its obsolescence to their in 2022; even Verizon stopped accepting CDMA2000 in the mid-late 2010’s, and I was even part of a project that retrieved equipment used for 3G from tower shelters and cabinets last year, where they may be sold used at a discount to developing countries.

Anyway, if a company is discontinuing a technology, especially one that may be used in an emergency (e.g. how are you going to call 119/110 otherwise?), usually it means their replacement has a fairly significant market share AND there’s enough enough redundancy to fall back on; they won’t pull 3G off the airwaves if there’s still a significant amount of users.

In the case of 4G LTE, it’s considered more of an internet access protocol, while 3G was more or less for voice that happened to integrate some data capabilities, kinda like how DSL or even dialup internet worked over a phone line, or expecting a CD player to know what to do with a piece of paper (oversimplification; it’s more complex than that), so it piggypacked 3G for non-VoLTE voice calls, and there were even some networks that falsely advertised the newest and fastest iteration of 3G (usually HSDPA+) as 4G when their infrastructure didn’t catch up fast enough, which caused confusion even when it was being implemented.

However, the proper next step was to transmit LTE via data (Voice over LTE/VoLTE, kind of a subset of Voice over IP/VoIP for making/receiving calls), but its capacity only arrived around 2016-ish, while LTE itself was invented in 2008 or so and became mainstream around the early 2010s. Also for a while, since VoLTE had better voice bandwidth than POTS (Plain Ol’ Telephone System), it was advertised as HD Voice and some phone companies capitalized on it, either as something to differentiate themselves or even as a premium option.

However, what this video is referencing are phones that have 4G LTE but haven’t been given VoLTE capability, so phones older than 2016 or so are most likely going to lose its 3G piggyback access since they haven’t implemented the technology to patch a voice call onto a data stream (sure, FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, Skype, LINE, and other messengers have been around for a long time and can EMULATE a phone call back then, but they used a completely different method that doesn’t touch anything related to making a 3G voice protocol phone call… Though in recent years Android and iOS, some apps have used the phone dialer API/Application Programming Interface to work with your phone a bit better, but it’s still not a phone call).

One thing that makes Taiwan unique is that I’m not sure whose wise decision was it to charge for traditional voice calls (I’ve already spent more time looking into the matter than I’d like to admit, and it’s getting late; I had a VERY long week, not to mention none of my Google search results actually explain it, especially given recent declines in search quality), but most people actually use LINE to replace phone calls (which isn’t as intuitive as some other messengers and kinda annoying in my opinion), so MAYBE there might be a way for those non-VoLTE phones to survive the 3G discontinuation.

7 Likes
10

Landline in Taiwan no longer work?
How’s that happen?

11

That’s one thing I never understood with telecoms in Taiwan. Very overpriced voice minutes and different rates to call different carriers just pushed everyone onto line call. Taiwan telecoms voice lines must be almost entirely unused. But relatively cheap data plans. Versus Canada and USA where they gave unlimited calls because it was a very under utilized service and made data very pricy

2 Likes
12

I also get the feeling they’re somehow identifying international VoIP traffic and messing with it. I can’t place a reliable Skype or Viber call from Taiwan to certain countries, but if I first connect to a VPN (in virtually any other country) it works perfectly.

3 Likes
13

I’ve tried calling landline numbers in Taiwan with skype and was having difficulty with it as well. As in some numbers absolutely will not connect with skype, but will connect if you call normally.

14

They probably just blocked you :wink: , a friend of mine started getting lots of marketing calls so had all VoIP calls blocked from their landline.

1 Like
15

It makes voip useless.

I know there’s supposed to be a way to allow certain identification enabled to prevent that, but it doesn’t work either.

I wasted money on skype credit only to find out I can’t even use it.

16

It’s only the same as other phone calls, people can set up to block any type of call But VoIP is used a lot by sales so gets blocked a lot. My grandmothers landline was blocked to all numbers that hadn’t been pre registered on the system.

Thats normal up to the person to set up, most people just blanket block because its less messing around.

Try before you buy

17

Can call government and bank offices with Skype, no problem.

1 Like
18

I don’t like calling land lines on my phone because it’s extremely expensive to call a land line with a cell phone, even more expensive than calling out of network. So I set up voip services to call land lines. But as it turns out some, or a lot of land lines block voip.

19

I use payphones to call landlines cheap and I get to use my change up too, win win. But payphones are becoming pretty rare

20

Try switching your voip client to TCP only, (disable UDP).

1 Like