The 3G service will be replaced with 4G/5G - it will probably be better, in all likelyhood. The range is based on the spectrum used, not the technology. 3G was kept around only because of old mobile devices (eg. PoS terminals) that needed it to function, not because it was any good.

It's kind of amusing to me that you blame our private telecom industry. I'm relatively sure Australia has some of the best mobile connectivity on the planet, with generally extremely high speeds, high data caps and usually, relatively good coverage. It is absolutely not a given that government service would be better.

You're right, but I don't yet know, and haven't been advised by my telco (who also owns that tower) what will happen during that migration next year.

My handset (Pixel 4A original) will need replacing if they go 5G only - I guess they will go 4 & 5 combined, but see above.

I don't know if my Telstra-installed (~ 2 years ago) repeater will work with 5G, or I'll need to buy a replacement.

I don't know if I have any recourse or remedy in the event that I lose all connectivity after the 3G retirement.

Signal propagation is weird. When the tech installed my repeater and yagi, most of the time was spent finding the optimum direction - he ended up pointing it at a hill probably 10 degrees off the measured direction for the tower (line of sight is impossible for us).

So, yes, you're right ... but still.

Anyway, Australia has some of the best mobile service coverage in populated areas - that's why they talk about percentage of humans that have coverage, not land area. And I totally understand why.

Reviewing https://www.telstra.com.au/coverage-networks/our-coverage - where I am, unboosted 3G, and to a lesser degree, 4G zones are asserted to be within several km of me - but the nearest 5G blob is ~60km. There's no 'coverage coming soon' zones within 300km of me.

And yes, I blame privatisation. Prior to that, if you wanted a landline service, connection fee was flat, no matter where you were. If that had continued on, presumably the same policy would apply today for other services.

Contesting for last-mile means it's now hideously expensive to the consumer - similarly for power connection - compared to a few decades ago.

>I replaced our Skymesh (geo-stationary) satellite (the only barely viable alternative) two years ago with Starlink. Skymesh gave me ~600ms RTT to Sydney servers, and maybe 25Mbps down (at 3am, clear sky, etc). Data cap was around 120GB / month, IIRC. Pricing was probably 75% of what I'm paying for Starlink now.

...what about Starlink's performance over the last 2 years?

Oh, yes, I should have mentioned that -- it feels like no difference in performance or availability to me.

My use case is web, remote desktop, video conf, phone (carrier->wifi voice is a transparent feature for me), streaming audio, syncthing.

Only a couple of those things are sensitive to the few seconds per hour that my dish seems to lose connection, and I suspect part of that is poor placement of my dish.

To your question, and TFA's point, though - I've not noticed any change in the frequency or duration of those ephemeral outages, nor any feeling of overall performance degradation.

I might have occasionally noticed evening drops in throughput, but little of my use case is impacted - I put that down to other customers in my cell ramping up their video streaming services that time of day.

The (mean) ~40ms latency has not changed over those two years (as expected).

NBN isn’t privatised. It’s 100% public. So it’s not fully privatised, I’m sure if folks give the liberals a couple more goes they’ll figure out how to sell it off and buy it back like Telecom

You're absolutely right. (Including your predictions.)