How did the smartphone based pass system work if - as tfa states - telecommunication infrastructure was also non functional?
For the average chilean: As long as you had 4G-5G equipment with working batteries, you had internet and access to essential gov services.
Nowadays some antennas go down right after a power outage because they don't have backup batteries. People also realised that they are quite pricey, so people melting copper lines moved to stealing batteries after the shift to optic fiber. To me this activity is straight out terrorism as it takes down critical infrastructure, I'm generally leftist, but ready to shoot these people on the spot if I actually had a gun.