[pfych]

Australia shut down its entire 3G network, which a lot of devices used for emergency calls. A lot of phones worked with 4G still but did not support using 4G for emergency calls.

The telco's solution was to sell new phones to people, which a lot of people didn't do. Apparently all of these phones that still worked were flagged and blocked from using 4G but this apparently wasn't the case.

[MoonWalk]

"A lot of phones worked with 4G still but did not support using 4G for emergency calls."

Now that should be illegal. It's absurd to think that everyone whose phone works just fine for regular calls is going to receive, understand, and heed upgrade messages. That's hugely irresponsible.

Furthermore, it looks like these customers may NOT have received any such messages: If the phone company could identify a user's phone as being out of date and send it an update warning, then that company could have banished it from its network. I see no excuse for what happened here.