Today we are pleased to announce Librem AweSIM: a prepaid, unlimited cellular service designed to work literally out of the box with the Librem 5. Sign up for Librem AweSIM and provide us with your preferred area code, and when your Librem 5 is ready to ship, we will register a new number to your SIM and install it into your Librem 5 so calls, SMS and cellular data just work when you unbox it.
Great initiative and something that I hope does very well. It would be great having Purism putting pressure on the other big careers to stop exploiting their customer’s privacy.
Republic Wireless is a company you guys should maybe talk to. They have a great wifi based continuation of services, that allow them to charge far less for service as their competitors.
It’s competitive with other fully unlimited prepaid plans, especially when you factor in privacy, since we aren’t subsidizing our price by selling customer data or pre-installing apps you can’t remove.
Right now there is just the individual plan. We are starting out simple and will expand features/services/plans based on demand, but I’ve already seen from a number of people a request for a family plan.
Can you elaborate on what is more private in this SIM plan than with other operators? I guess you are setup as a reseller or MVNO, and it’s unclear how that differs from eg. a T-Mobile plan where you can bring your own device (so no preloads, etc.). The post is light on these important details.
That’s the ‘great initiative’ part and I applaud Purism for offering that.
Prepaid usually is a temporary solution or used for burner phones. Since burner phones in the EU need to be registered too nowadays a SIM only is more common service I guess.
We register the phone number in Purism’s name, not the customer’s name, so, for instance, TMobile or AT&T would not have a direct link between one of our customers and a particular phone number that they could use to track and market from.
Most interesting. I have for many years had a SIM card from a provider with no base stations where I usually move so I almost always use roaming. The problem is that my provider does not have roaming agreements with all the operators (probably because that is expensive) and unfortunately I must have access to three networks to get coverage all the time.
So, are you prepared to sign roaming agreements with a lot of operators (three or four for each country) ? As an example you should use Telia, Tele2, Telenor and Tre in Sweden and Telia, Elisa and DNA in Finland to get good coverage. But the idea is good. If I use only the network of for example Telia I will have no coverage in our house in Sweden and lousy coverage in our house in Finland. I must have a phone with two SIM cards to have at least tolerable coverage.
At the moment the plan is only within the US. We will look into expanding into other countries based on demand and our ability to do so while retaining customer privacy (from what I’ve heard, some countries require that a customer’s full name and contact information be registered with a particular number and registering a number in Purism’s name wouldn’t be allowed, I assume so citizens are easier to track by law enforcement).
I’m going to call BS on that. I’m paying 50 Euro a month for 6GB data on Telekom, with unlimited talk and SMS. The new plans that came out are for 35 Euro but that is 6GB data, not unlimited.
Beyond that, there is always a discount if you sign up for a multi-year contract with a provider. Sometimes the discount is in the form of reduced monthly rate, sometimes it takes the form of a large discount on a new phone.
You signed a 2 year contract though, right? Also, what I’ve discovered is that prices and features between cellular carriers vary WIDELY across different countries, especially comparing the US with EU carriers.
At least in the US, there is always a discount if you sign up for a multi-year contract with a provider to incentivize people locking in. Sometimes the discount is in the form of reduced monthly rate, sometimes it takes the form of a large discount on a new phone.
I think there might be some misunderstandings going on here.
If Telekom offered unlimited everything, to include data, for 35 Euro a month, there wouldn’t be enough bandwidth on their network to handle all of it.
I pay AT&T $55.16/mo. for unlimited calls/texts and 2GB data with rollover. I don’t use much data. watch MLB games but no downloading.
When my Librem 5 arrives I’m using a Tracfone sim prepaid plan.
I get political(just for awhile longer) texts and calls but no spam. The NSA can get into any electronic device. I know that for a fact.
I’m just tired of Google
“Librem AweSIM also means having knowledgeable and friendly customer support. Using Librem AweSIM means getting tech support from a team who not only wants to provide you good customer service but also understands what a Librem 5 running PureOS is and how to troubleshoot it.”
I hope that you have more than just poor @mladen running that – I mean, he’s great and all, but 'cmon, how much can one guy do?
Heh, well regardless of whatever carrier a person uses, if they are having problems connecting using their Librem 5, they are likely going to be contacting our support team, right? In this case we can at least rule out the carrier blocking the device, frequency support, and similar potential issues so in theory this should make support easier
