At a holiday house in Cornwall, where cellular coverage generally isn't, and the mobile phone dance involved standing on the highest point of the boundary wall, all the iThings started work anywhere in the house about a couple of years ago.
We assume this is either witchcraft or the fact that iThings can now do SMS and VOIP over WLAN just as easily as they have always (well for about a decade) been able to to SMS and calls on networks in any country, and internet stuff on any GSM network or WLAN.
It sort of begs the question as to why that wasn't built in from the start. I suppose the programmers / marketing people thought that WiFi with no celular coverage wouldn't be a common use case.
Of course, cellular companies have previous for poor decisions. Like:-
1) Texts not being allowed to go to another network unless the sender used in a foreign SMS service centre which made the SMSs free.
2) Cellphones that couldn't run from mains electricity, only 12 V. They could charge from mains, but not run. The assumption being that wherever there is mains, there is a cheap landline.
3) Having the phone, not the network, remember the credit on PAYG phones, on the assumption that no-one would ever hack a handset to get free calls.
4) Banning calls to a PAYG helpline from a contract phone of the same network, while allowing calls to the helpline from other networks.
5) Blocking calls to ISPs as soon as they realised that they were "digital" calls, thus preventing dial-up modem calls at high prices, which had been possible for a couple of years, without providing an alternative.
6) Making some protocol change that stopped a couple of hundred Iot things (before they were called that) from connecting. When asked, saying that nothing had changed when it clearly had. Presumable nothing changed back again six months later when they all came to life.
