Australia

How do the telcos get more money? A few phone sales are not going to do anything to their profits. They own the 3G infrastructure, it's theirs. They could have legally turned it off years ago and there's nothing anyone (including the government) could have done about it. Forcing them to sell a service is no different to forcing Woolies to sell your favourite brand of peanut butter. You can argue that the Government of the day should never have sold 100+ years of infrastructure investment and only privatised the retail side of Telstra - and would 100% agree with you. But that horse bolted 30 years ago. The simple truth is that all our phones rely on three companies and with few exceptions, there are no guarantees the service will work. As that Optus outage a year ago demonstrated.

I'm all about bashing on the telcos when they deserve it. But they've handled this about as nicely as was possible. They've been warning everyone for over a year. They've been individually messaging affected phones for months. Nobody can really say they didn't get warning.

I don't really agree with blocking IMEIs of phones they didn't sell because they're not sure they'll work without 3G. But I see the reasoning for it. They can't make a regular call today, but they can make an emergency call. They are forcing that pain now, while the phone can still call in an emergency instead of it dropping totally off the network at a future date when it can't make any sort of call. I'd have gone the other direction to give those customers more time. I recognise though that some people simply would not have done anything until they were forced to - no matter how much time they were given.