This is obviously not good, but is there evidence that they are broadly worse than the competition? I always thought telco internal networks were full of stuff like this (out of date and misconfigured crap everywhere, with heavy reliance on firewalls/vpns).
Is there really SSL communication between terminals and base station in the LTE protocol? This seems unlikely because it's below the IP layer. They could of course use openssl for the crypto primitives in implementing LTE but are there vulnerabilities in those primitives that would be fixed by updating openssl?
There could be TLS involved in higher level protocols like IMS though. Or not. Does anyone know if eg VoLTE relies on the network for security or does it run SIP over DTLS or something?