Hello Everyone! Does anyone know if the LIbrem 5 has internationally compatibility including making calls from Costa Rica? Does anyone recommend a carrier that is privacy honoring in Costa Rica too? Thank you!!!
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The former depends on your modem variant, and the latter does not exist anywhere.
You can check what frequency bands are used your country by local service providers from Site Search - FrequencyCheck and compare that to the available modems, what they support at Will my existing SIM card work? What countries and networks will be supported? – Purism - it looks like B1, B3, B5, and B7 are in use and both T and E variants seem to cover those best (A is missing two).
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It also depends on whether a Librem 5 is already owned and what country the OP will normally be in.
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1_ Check with the Costa Rican carriers available to you to find out if they still have operational 2G or 3G networks, as many countries have shut those down or are planning to do so eventually. (See @JR-FI’s first link, above, which, by the way, may not have taken this fact into account.) If no 2G, or no 3G coverage exists, then you will have only 4G to rely on.
2_ Compare the 4G bands of each of Purism’s modems - (check the second link that @JF-FI provided) - to see which modem aligns with your available carriers, but…
3- … you also must find out if your chosen carrier requires VoLTE certification to complete phone calls, or whether either 2G or 3G is available as a second option for calls. If a carrier does require VoLTE, but doesn’t authorize/recognize the Librem 5’s modem as being capable of VoLTE calls, and if there is no 2G or no 3G network as an alterntive for calls, then you are probably out of luck. If VoLTE is not required, and if your modem corresponds to enough of the available bands, then you should be good, in theory.
4- Let’s ask @amosbatto , if he’s “listening,” who is, or was living in Bolivia (far from Costa Rica, I know), which modem he has had success with in the “south,” as Purism hasn’t explicitly stated which modem might be best suited to Central and South America. (As far as I know, I mean.)
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I was just in Costa Rica with my Librem 5 last week!
I’ve only had the phone for a few weeks, so I’m still getting familiar with it. I live in the US so I got the BM818-A1 (North America) modem. My carrier is Boost Mobile, with the Global Roaming add-on. In Costa Rica I used the phone mainly for Internet purposes (email, instant messaging, Wikipedia). Data coverage seemed pretty good in the San José area, but I spent most of my time in the Pacific Coast area (Puntaranas), where I frequently lost internet access (exclamation mark on the cell icon), especially driving along Route 34.
One weird thing I noticed is that the Maps app would sometimes show my location as being in the US (Corpus Christi, TX, a city I have never visited). I don’t know if this is related to the location service settings or the cell settings.
SMS seemed to work reliably as long as I had cell service. I didn’t test voice calls.
I hope this helps somewhat. I’ll be going back to Costa Rica in June, so I’ll do some more testing then.
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Thanks for that info, and please do report back after your next trip.
It would be informative to find out how a local SIM works in the Librem 5 down there. Then the Cellular Providers wiki could be updated to include Costa Rica.
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