[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these customers may NOT have received any such messages: If the phone company could identify a user's phone as being out of date and send it an update warning, then that company could have banished it from its network.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.