Imagine you’re on a far-flung farm and you have been gored by a bull or pinned under your tractor.

You reach for your trusty old mobile phone, hit the emergency 000 code … and you’re greeted by silence.

That’s the prospect potentially facing tens or hundreds of thousands of country Australians – no one quite knows the actual number – if things don’t improve remarkably by the time the phone networks switch off the last of their 3G services in........

© The Sydney Morning Herald