5G is coming to more places in Australia, and folks in the country’s Deep South can now jump on, provided they have one of a handful of phones.
It’s been an interesting few years as telcos jump onto the 5G bandwagon, but it is still taking its time.
You can find support for 5G in much of the nation’s capital cities, and while it is growing, it’s one of those things that like most things is just going to end up taking some time to get there.
For Optus — which was the second telco to launch 5G in Australia following Telstra — we’re seeing some of that time come up positive, especially if you happen to live in Tasmania, with Hobart being switched onto 5G at the telco, provided you have a supported device.
Even though you can find a lot of 5G phones out in the market, ranging from the iPhone 12 range, iPhone 13 range, to models in the mid-range, the Optus 5G Tasmania rollout is really specific, at least in the beginning, relying on devices using the 2100MHz spectrum, which means only a handful of phones that can work.
Sadly, that means no 5G iPhone can play along in Tasmania just yet, with Optus 5G compatibility in Hobart currently working with models in Samsung’s Galaxy S21 and S22 range, plus one of Oppo’s handsets, as well. It means if you have either the Galaxy S21, S21 FE, or S21 Ultra, or even the S22+ or S22 Ultra, you can use 5G in Tasmania on Optus, as well as those who own an Oppo Find X3 Pro. Folks with any other kind of 5G phone appear to miss out right now.
“We’ve been working incredibly hard to be able to bring 5G to Tasmania and today’s announcement is the first step towards achieving this,” said Lambo Kanagaratnam, Vice President of Networks at Optus.
The good news is more handset support should come eventually, but Optus did confirm to Pickr that its rollout of 5G was dependent on the need to support 2100MHz, which means only a handful of 5G phones were supported at launch.
As such, it may come back to that whole issue of “time”, whereby if you wait over time, you should see improvements and changes eventually, including support for more phones in Tassie, at that.
