Telstra’s GSM network closed on 1st December as pre-advised two years ago. The network, the first of the three GSM networks, lauched on 27th April 1993. Having carried, by Telstra’s estimate, 87 billion calls in its 23 years it has had a pretty good life as technologies go.
The technology was launched with some fanfare in 1993 but was not met with great market success in the early years because the then Telstra 1G AMPS network provided wider coverage. As well the early GSM phones suffered from “new technology blues” with inferior battery life and call quality compared to the AMPS units at the time. So tough was the selling proposition for GSM in the early days that it took more than four years after GSM launch i.e. until July 1997 for the number of customers on all three GSM networks in Australia to equal the number on the old AMPS network.
The Telstra GSM network reached peak services of 7.2 million in March 2006 the same month that GSM services on all three networks peaked at 16.7 million. They have all seen a slow decline since with GSM becoming a back up for 3G phones. 3G phones initially launched in the 2100MHz band so the coverage was inferior to the low band 900MHz used from the outset on GSM.
For Telstra however following the launch of NextG 3G at 850MHz on 6th October 2006 across their full base station footprint there was very seldom a need for a mobile to look for the GSM coverage security blanket again. Telstra claimed early last year that less than 1% of its calls were being carried on its GSM network and that its 3G and 4G networks had four times the coverage of GSM.
Telstra said it had not sold GSM only phones for many years. Their view was that for mobile telephony it would not be missed. Some embedded low speed, low volume GSM data device users are likely the most inconvenienced by the shut down. These devices can be moved to Optus or Vodafone with a SIM change however the Optus GSM network will shut down in April 2017 and Vodafone’s on 30th September 2017 so only a temporary reprieve.