PRL updates are critical to the operation of, at least, a CDMA network. Preferred Roaming List, but really a list of all the towers and pilot signal channels and so on. Without it, you cannot see some towers, so cannot get good signal.

They are updated… when you call Customer Service. This worked great for the most part. Most users call in with great regularity (monthly or better), it can be (I guess?) transmitted over the paging channel at the same time the call is going on so little or no bandwidth is lost, and the best part is that if they are calling it might be due to a signal drop issue. The act of calling might fix it.

Depending on the update in question, clever queuing strategies like this might work great. There are lots of gaps and low-demand periods an other tricks to avoid a bandwidth waste argumen. And they are needed for the 99% who have no idea how anything works, and sorta don’t care. It will be at least a generation before these are considered mobile devices, not “phones.” And everyone knows phones are solid state, plug and dial devices. Explain why you need software updates.

Sure, there’s no reason that a sideloading secondary channel cannot be provided for that 1% of nerds, but it does add effort to the development. A lot of updates handle repeated installs poorly, so there has to be an update flag on the device (instead of universal OTA, where the system can go down a list and check off itself).