The Librem 5 could be the start of a new trend of smartphones with easily replaceable and upgradable components. I doubt that Samsung or Apple would follow this trend. It could remain niche. But we can not predict where the Librem 5 will lead. The puzzle phone concept could make a return.
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They are. We can not mitigate every concern and risk without controlling every part of the system and that just isn’t realistic at the moment. All we can do is reduced the risks we can and trust in the components of the system we can’t.
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That is possible and exactly how we get the modules we have.
The Quectel EM06, EG06 and EP06 all use the same modem just in different form factors.
I did come past a company that has modems that where designed to be swapped in a slot like changing your CPU but they didn’t have an M.2 card for them.
Biggest problem would become costs. We would need someone to design the card. Maybe have it modular to accept modems from different companies. Then we need to make them. Production scale would reduce costs. Those of us that can make our own cards would be less affected.
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I would love to see more cell phones with a replaceable cellular modem, but it is very unlikely to become a trend for the following reasons:
- An SoC with an integrated modem costs less than two chips and takes up less space, which is critical on phones. Qualcomm and Mediatek offer their integrated modems for so cheap that only companies with special reasons like Apple, Pine64 and Purism are not going to use them. Adding an M.2 or PCIe slot, plus a separate card makes the modem very expensive. The cheapest cellular modems on an M.2 card cost $30, so I would guesstimate that Purism can get them in large quantities for around $17 a piece, plus $3 for the M.2 connector, so around $20, plus $20 for the i.MX 8M Quad SoC, so $40 in total. In comparison, the Snapdragon 427 with an integrated modem probably costs around $10 in large quantities.
- Because the cellular modem can get hot if used for very long, you either need to cool it like the SoC (so you might as well include it in the SoC since it makes designing the cooling system easier) or you need to use a huge chip package like the Gemalto SPL8 which is 29x32x2mm in size to distribute the heat. It is very hard to provide cooling for a chip on an M.2 card, so you are stuck with giant chip packages on 3042 M.2 cards. Nobody makes cellular modems in smaller 1630 or 2230 M.2 cards because of the need for cooling. No phone maker (except for an oddball company like Purism) is willing to dedicate 30 x 42 x 2.3 mm of space to the cellular modem because it kills the aesthetics.
- Almost all the industry works on planned obsolescence to increase sales which is why batteries can’t be replaced and the headphone jack is being removed and companies like Apple make it hard to get original replacement parts, so they aren’t going to be at all enthusiastic about replaceable cellular modems and the cellular providers don’t want to promote phones which allow people to easily switch their networks.
If other companies decide to copy the Librem 5, they are very unlikely to copy its M.2 cellular modem. Sadly, the Librem 5 is probably going to be one of a kind, and it only happened because every cellular baseband in existence requires binary blobs in the Linux kernel, so the only way to have a 100% free software phone was to control the modem via a USB interface over M.2.
Sadly, there is no way to make an economical 100% free software phone.
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If that is the case Purism might as well give up now and walk away. The impossible becomes possible all the time.
I am willing to pay a little bit more or sacrifice something unnecessary for something I consider important. Except for one phone all of mine have had user replaceable batteries. I’ve just never had the highest specifications in them except for 2.
A trend doesn’t have to be the most popular thing in the world. It just has to be a recurring event. If the niche phone makers take it up for most or all of their phones that would make it a trend in my opinion.[quote=“amosbatto, post:96, topic:6067”]
Adding an M.2 or PCIe slot, plus a separate card makes the modem very expensive.
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True that it adds cost. It also adds complexity to the design. The question is are we the consumers willing to accept the increase in exchange for the feature. M.2 and mPCIe are not the only options.
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I’m certainly willing to pay $100 more for a phone that has a replaceable cellular modem, because I care about the environmental impact of electronics and planned obsolescence, but it is important to understand why no company did it before Purism. Todd Weaver is truly unique in the hardware industry in what he is willing to do to run a Linux kernel without binary blobs. Purism is going to extraordinary measures by running the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth over SDIO and the cellular modem over USB+M.2, and putting the binary blob to initialize the LPDDR4 RAM in a separate Flash memory chip and running U-Boot on a separate Cortex-M4 core in order to execute that blob.
Frankly, I stand in awe of the company, but I can’t see any of the other Linux companies doing the same, because you need a company that is really committed to the ideals of Free Software Foundation to do it. If the Librem 5 becomes a huge commercial success, we might see copycats, which would be fantastic, but the economics are not in our favor.
Sorry, but they are the only options. As I explained in my previous post, nobody makes a cellular baseband chip package that is smaller than 29x32x2 mm because you need a giant heat spreader to redistribute the heat, so you are either stuck with a 30x42 mm M.2 card or a 30×50.95 mm mPCIe card. You can’t use the smaller sizes because the chip package won’t fit on them. If you have better cooling, then you can use a smaller chip package, but how are you going to implement better cooling on a plugin card? Even if you create a custom chip socket to put on the motherboard, how are you going to attach the cooler? Remember that Purism is a tiny company, so it can’t demand custom form factors from suppliers.
Purism is in a bind here. I assume that Purism didn’t select the Quectel EG25-G for the Librem 5 which supports 30 bands, because it required some binary blob, whereas the PinePhone is using it because Pine64 doesn’t care about free software. However, the reason might be because this chip is only available on mPCIe cards, and Purism couldn’t find another 8mm of space.
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Can you post a link or the name of the company? I would love to see how they cooled it.
This is probably what Purism people are curently doing/proofing if already done. Furthermore, Gemalto PLS-8 LGA chip is 2,9 mm thick. By adding M.2 connector PCB plate there is to expect to be more in thickness. And as stated, Gemalto’s proprietary LGA footprint (156 pad LGA mount) leads me to conclusion that it will be swappable on M.2 plate or hopefully offered as an upgradable M.2 modem card version (for replacement). It is already mentioned that: “unique LGA form factor compatible with past and next generation wireless modules ensures easy migration between wireless standards from a single design as technology needs evolve.”
Another eventual (expensive) and proprietary (again) LGA form factor option in 2,9 mm thickness may be Telit LE922A6-E2 LTE CAT-6 + required (developed) M.2 connector board. Additionally, to ensure good long term heat dissipation for such M.2 PCB plate requirement like the electroless nicker/immersion gold (ENIG) may be relatively expensive as well. And for example, finalized product versions of the Quectel EM06-E and EM06-A LTE-A Cat 6 M.2 modules are 2,3mm thick in total. I have great respect for Purism people effort.
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Underrated tweet 
The problem is, I think very few people know this, understand it, or even care.
Many don’t understand why the pine phone is so much cheaper. (Although I could imagine the price going up a bit).
Purism should make sure the reviewers of the press know of all those design decisions.
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I will search through what I’ve already been past. I didn’t give it much of a look because it wasn’t M.2. There are plenty of chips that use LCC that can be socket mounted or surface mounted.
This package is smaller. Definitely smaller than M.2.
Digi Xbee LTE-M
Sorry. I forgot the link.
The standard for cellular M.2 is to use the back plate for heat dissipation so the heat management for M.2 is already designed in the card. Unless Purism isn’t using an industry standard/best practice/accepted industry procedure we can use any M.2 module that is compatible with the main board.
Again though, after talking with manufacturers, M.2 isn’t being adopted in the industry.
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The Quectel BC66 (17.7×15.8×2.0 mm) is only designed for surface mounting, but you have more cooling options on a motherboard and you can make the chip package smaller. If you could cool that same chip properly on a plugin card, Quectel would offer it on a half-sized mPCIe card (30x26.8 mm), but no manufacturer does, whereas many manufacturers offer Wi-Fi/Bluetooth on half-sized mPCIe cards.
Laptop manufacturers have every reason to want to solve this problem. They want to make one laptop model and change the cellular modem for every region/provider, but they have all stuck with the larger 3042 M.2 and full-sized mPCIe cards for a reason. Laptop makers could save a ton of money by designing a surface mounted socket for the cellular baseband, but none have done it, and I have to assume that figuring out how to cool a socketed chip has been the problem. You need to clamp down a graphite sheet, a copper sheet or a heat pipe on top to pull away the heat. Huawei reports that 5G uses 2.5 times more energy than 4G, so this is going to be an even greater problem in the future.
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Cooling is a problem. Even Samsung and Apple haven’t been able to get it right with all their money that’s put into R&D.
A problem yes. One that we don’t need and shouldn’t create for ourselves.
3 seconds to download a 2 hour movie. Great if we are downloading a ton of movies to watch offline. Although I’m sure it takes longer then 3 seconds to pick witch movie to watch. If you’re streaming that speed is wasted.
I know movies isn’t the only thing 5g is for but for most users it is probably the task that uses the most bandwidth. I’ll be forced to use 5g one-day because 4g will be switch switched off to free up frequencies for sub6. The high speed mmWave can remain exclusively for smart cars and cities.
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I totally agree. At this point, S. Korea, Singapore, Netherlands and Norway have 4G download speeds that average around 50 MBit/s. Implementing 4G around the world is a much better goal than 5G, which will only work in the center of cities anyway and will probably cause health problems for the millions of people who have to live next door to the 5G microstations.
Frankly, 5G is mostly marketing BS, so that the smartphone industry can have the next big thing to jump start a stagnant smartphone market that is no longer growing. It is all about convincing people that they need something new and that their existing phone isn’t good enough.
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This is a LTE-M Module.
There’s a significant difference between LTE Cat-M and the LTE you expect to use in a mobile device.
LTE-M is a separate Standard for low-powered sensor-type devices and only supports low-power ultra-low-datarate applications.
No web-browsing, calling, chatting, … over LTE-M, it doesn’t deliver the datarate.
This is also reflected in the hardware, a design goal of LTE-M was to significantly reduce the required hardware, and thus LTE-M hardware is much smaller, much cheaper, uses less power - but just doesn’t have the required features to be used in phone-type hardware.
Just to make this clear: while LTE-M could support up to 1 Mbps, in practice this will never be reached.
We’re talking average data rates of about 100 kbps.
The BC66 is a NB-IoT module, which while based on LTE, is a significantly different technology.
NB-IoT devices are not capable of being a phone modem.
They can’t do voice calls, they can’t even do TCP transmissions.
NB-IoT is a standard for sensor-type devices and can deliver about 10-20 Kilobits per second.
You can send sensor data multiple times a day, but you couldn’t open a webpage, send a matrix message or do anything you expect to do with a phone.
5G is a real thing, but people are generally misinformed about what it actually is, largely due to poor reporting and marketing gone out of hand.
5G is a capacity layer. Most of the worlds 4G networks are run at capacity, and people need more. Significantly more.
That’s what 5G is here for; bringing larger bandwidth, especially for densely populated areas where LTE can barely cope anymore.
Fundamentally 5G is so similar to LTE that it’s barely new technology, especially the early deployments.
It it breaks some assumptions you could make for LTE, and requires support for significantly broader channels, more different frequencies and a lot more compute power.
That’s why new hardware is inevitable, the current LTE hardware just doesn’t have the capacity.
That said, right now LTE is fine, 5G is there to take the load off. The handset-manufactures will of course be happy to be able to sell you a new device. While most people will not need a 5G handset in a while, there are 2 significant reasons why it’s a good thing:
- The heavy users can shell out the big bucks for the newest tech and get what they want, while also taking load of LTE for the other users to enjoy.
- 5G will be widely deployed in the future and the early adopters help financing this - and all future users will profit; even those that can now rightly say: LTE is enough. It was the same with LTE; at some point 3G was enough.
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LTE-M is capable of handling VoLTE and SMS. Data rates are low but we can’t have everything.
I should have noticed that it isn’t a standard LTE chip. That explains why the chip package is smaller than all the others that we looked at.
Granted that we should probably be arguing about specific aspects of 5G, rather than just saying “5G,” because it is big standard that involves many things.
Here are the problems as I see it:
- mmWave should not be permitted. The US government should free up frequencies in the below 6 GHz space like every other country is doing if it wants 5G. If the US government wants to use mmWave, we should demand health studies to prove that it is safe. Anything can block the mmWave signal and you have to put mmWave antennas on all four edges of the phone, and then you have to put microstations every 250 meters just to implement it. This is insane and we have no idea what will be the health effects. mmWave will have a very limited range and by very costly compared to using the below 6 GHz frequencies.
- We have a little better idea what happens to people living next to sub-6GHz cell towers, and we know that some people have real problems. Shenzhen is supposedly the model for 5G implementation, and they are planning 24,000 macro-stations and 21,000 micro-stations, so everyone in the city will be within 200 meters of a station. Do you want to live next to a 5G stations? I know that I don’t.
- Huawei says that its 5G cellular baseband chip uses 2.5 times more energy than its 4G chip, and its 5G phone uses 2 times more energy than its 4G model. If all 3 billion smartphones in the world double their energy consumption by moving to 5G, think about the amount of GHG emissions and the amount of extra fossil fuel extraction that will cause. Huawei had to use an expensive 0.4mm copper sheet for heat dissipation, rather than a cheap graphite sheet or heat pipes. Multiply 2 grams of copper by 3 billion phones and you start to see the problem. Extracting a kg of virgin copper emits 25 kg of GHGs. We only have 60 years of copper left (at current extraction rates with today’s reserves at current prices). As the price of copper goes up, more reserves will be economically viable to extract, but we will be using low-grade laterite ores which have a much greater environmental impact to extract per kg of copper than today’s ores.
- 5G will make billions of people junk their current phones and buy new models. A Greenpeace study calculates that the manufacturing of smartphones and tablets in 2014 consumed 9.4% of the world’s primary production of cobalt in 2014, and cobalt is essential for making the transition to 100% renewable energy because it is used in electric car and grid batteries. Mobile device production in 2014 used 1.8% of the world’s silver, 1.6% of gold, 8.9% of palladium, 1.4% of indium, 1.1% of magnesium, 2.7% of tantalum, 0.78% of tin. Each of these metals are very important. For example Indium is essential for making CIGS thin-film solar cells. Why are we wasting the world’s resources to make devices that we don’t need?
- 5G will increase the growing gap between the rich and the poor and the gap between the urban and rural regions. The rich who can afford expensive cellular plans in the cities will have 5G, while everyone else is left in the slow lane. We already have enough social division as it is, which is leading to the rise of dangerous right-wing populists with Fascist tendencies like Trump, Duterte, Putin, Erdogan, etc. who feed on the resentments of people who feel like they have been left behind. In place of China spending $411 billion to implement 5G, it should be spending that money to provide better 4G coverage to the entire country, so it can reduce the gap between the rich and the poor and the urban and the rural, and every country should be doing the same to reduce the social divisions.
- We desperately need to move to a mobile device industry which is not based on planned obsolescence, but 5G is being used by the mobile device industry and the cellular providers to promote another cycle of planned obsolescence and greater sales. Smartphone sales have finally peaked in recent years and there is some evidence that people are starting to use their phones longer before junking them. 5G is going to reverse that recent trend.
- 5G is creating all sorts of geopolitical tensions, since 3 of the 6 companies that make 5G equipment are Chinese and the US is using very questionable methods (like the Huawei ban) to try to hinder Chinese economic domination, especially in developing countries.
- 5G is creating another division between countries, and every country feels compelled to invest billions in the new technology to keep up with its neighbors. The world is going to waste trillions of dollars implementing 5G when that money could be much better spent in 4G and other infrastructure projects. Countries like the US need to be spending their resources on a Green New Deal, not 5G.
The parts of the 5G standard to make it more flexible and more efficient in the use of frequency bands are good, but there are serious environmental, social and health concerns with the other parts of 5G. Part of the reason why I helped crowdfund the Librem 5 is because it is one of the only phones on the market (besides the Fairphone) which is NOT based on planned obsolescence, so it makes me very mad that the cellular industry is promoting new standards that will make the Librem 5 obsolete in a couple years time.
The mobile industry could have implemented an evolutionary path with 4G that would have gotten faster speeds for a broader swath of the population (not just the urban rich) and wouldn’t make today’s 3 billion smartphones obsolete. At any rate, the average download speeds in the best countries (like S. Korea) is only 50 MBit/s, and the 4G standard supports up to 100 MBit/s and that could have been extended to 150 MBit/s, so you have to ask if 5G was really necessary, since we have an evolutionary path with 4G.
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