Weeks later, a FedEx truck arrived. Inside was a battered Nokia Fastmile with a sticky note: "Bricked. Please help. - Rural Co-op, Montana."

She couldn’t delete the file—the root filesystem was a read-only squashfs. Any change would vanish on reboot.

She fixed it. Then another came. Then five.

She ran a speed test. 387 Mbps down.

She spent hours scrolling through the file system. The gateway ran a stripped-down Linux. She found the lock: a script called simlock.sh in /etc/init.d/ . Inside was a list of forbidden PLMN IDs (carrier codes). If your SIM’s code matched one on the "not allowed" list, the gateway disabled the radio.