quokka

Even 20 years ago the Easter eggs would arrive in stores before Christmas and be put on the shelves not soon after.

Jesus. Five years? That could be sorted out in a week if anyone wanted to

This is a pretty good rundown of how fucked it is https://medium.com/@jamesdwho/australias-3g-shutdown-telcos-to-block-working-4g-5g-phones-2bf41e95de8a And now why there’s more interest in “restoring” IMEIs to compatible, but blocked, handsets than there was a year ago.

The problem was that some handsets (including ones sold by the networks as “4G”) would drop to 3G for 000. Even same models on different firmware behaved differently. So the regulator said to ban any the networks weren’t 100% sure were compatible. With 30(?) days’ notice. And the online IMEI checker is incomplete/useless too. So now the only realistic place for average consumers to buy known-compatible handsets is from the network operators. At their prices, with their software.