Quote from the wiki:
This page addresses questions which aren’t answered in the official Purism FAQ and the Librem 5’s Developers FAQ. It is written by community members, who have their own opinions, so don’t take the answers in this page as the official word from Purism, unless links are provided to an article on the Purism website or a Purism employee is quoted.
I don’t see where the language implies that it’s official.
Another issue is that some cellular providers have whitelists of phones that they allow on their networks, and Purism has indicated that it will not try to get the Librem 5 certified on any cellular networks. For US customers, where many of the major cellular providers do have whitelists, Purism will be offering its new AweSIM service.
I’d say that actually directly states an official position from Purism, though it lacks a citation and, thus, any context for why Purism appears to have taken that position. Also I’m going to assume getting the phone “certified” is synonymous with getting it “whitelisted”, unless someone had their language confused when they wrote this question.
Well, there are several things. To my knowledge, at least some of the modems are pre-certified with major networks!? Not sure, maybe @amosbatto can shed some light on this.
Secondly, I seems very plausible to me that, if VoLTE is not yet supported, but possibly a requirement for certification, then it wouldn’t make sense to try to get certification right now.
That seems plausible and makes sense. If that’s the case, it would certainly put me at ease about the situation.
IT should go fine!
Interesting. Maybe i should try that first…
I did a Google search for PLS8 and BM818 and “certification” or “certified” or “whitelist” or T-Mobile or AT&T or Sprint or Verizon, and I can’t find any mention of these two modem models being certified for any cellular networks. BM818 doesn’t publish much public info about its modems, but it also seems to be mainly focused on the Chinese market, so I think it unlikely to be certified for any carrier. There should be some mention in the Gemalto forum if the PLS8 has been certified for a carrier.
I based the wiki text on this comment by Nicole Faerber in August 2019:
we (as in Purism) currently have no plans to get additional carrier approvals. Getting carrier approvals is a PITA and in most cases bound to very high restrictions on the device and a very expensive qualification process. Especially the restrictions carriers in many cases impose on handsets and their features or access of the carrier onto the handset (for remote configuration etc.) are “features” we do not want to have on our device. We want the users to have the maximum freedom on their device and not being forced to have locked down parts.
So if Sprint is not supporting our modem, I am sorry, the Sprint is not an option. In the US I know that e.g. T-Mobile is very open, in Europe it is the law that carriers must accept all 3GPP compliant devices.
That was a long time ago, and maybe Purism’s plans have changed since then, in light of the announced blocking of non-VoLTE phones by T-Mobile and AT&T, and the fact that the one person who has tried to use Verizon with the Librem 5 had problems.
If Purism is going to provide the AweSIM service on the T-Mobile and AT&T networks, it has to be in conversations with those two carriers, so I think it likely that Purism will have to work something out with them if they decide to restrict access to only whitelisted phones in the future.
Reading between the lines from what @dos posted (see the wiki for links), it sounds like BroadMobi can update the firmware to support VoLTE, and I imagine that is what Purism is waiting for, but it also sounds like BroadMobi isn’t the most responsive company.
You got a point there. For me this is only 25 per cent more on my current plan.
Then again I got one of those unlimited plan for all my phones because I was using my phone as a modem for a few months and my wife was traveling. That gig is over and my wife is back and I should probably go back to a cheaper plan.
From the PLS8 datasheet:
They come with full type approval (FTA) and they are certified by the largest global network operators.
I knew I had read that somewhere 
So according to Nicole Faerber, in Europe (presumably the EU + selected other countries), all 3GPP-compliant devices must be supported, but what exactly does “3GPP-compliant” mean in this case, and would the BM818 qualify? From a cursory glance at Wikipedia, there are a lot of incremental 3GPP standards, ranging from GSM to 5G – so would anything that implements GSM/2G already qualify as “compliant”?