Modem for phone AU NZ South America

Hardware Librem 5
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As I understand it, yes.

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Nice! Thank you very much!

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Just in case Purism monitors this thread I will also +1 for Australian concerns about the modems.

Taking the information from the modem frequencies section of the FAQ (puri.sm/faq/) and local carrier information from frequencycheck.com, it looks like the PLS8-E modem will work in Australia but have no coverage in the USA (assuming I am interpreting the documents correctly) and vice versa for the PLS8-US.

I do a reasonable amount of travel, sometimes to the USA, and even though the modems are swappable I donā€™t really like the idea of having to look after a spare modem while I travel and swapping a modem on my knee in an airport shuttle.

The lack of one modem with some chance of working in Australia, Europe, and the USA is a major disincentive for me.

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It seems like the more up-to-date thread on this would be

I would contact support@puri.sm and ask if they can offer to ship two modems. After all, they put a lot of effort into making the modem exchangeable.

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I posted the same question a little while back and did a good deal of research which the kind people here helped me with.

You can make your own mind up of course, but Iā€™m in the wait and see crowd. There are a a couple of open source type phones about to hit such as e foundation and the pinephone who are now counting down. I am tempering my enthusiasm and will wait to see how all of these stack up. Like you, I am very keen for a Librem phone but the modem choices, from what we have now, may be problematic for people like me in the regions.

Just my two cents worth.

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Iā€™m in the exactly same situation, and I am waiting for some news for a while nowā€¦ I hope theyā€™ll announce something soon about a modem that is compatible with the Australian frequencies

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Thanks, Dani @Caliga. That pointer was very helpful.

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Thanks @Brad. I followed the link from @Caliga to the other thread, and am grateful for the work you did and the responses you elicited. I will follow Caligaā€™s suggestion and contact Purism support to see what they have to say about selling/shipping multiple modems, and report results back to this thread.

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Wow! That was a quick response from Purism (5 - 10 minutes).
@Caliga @Brad @deedend

My question:

If I wanted to order one Librem 5 phone with both swappable modems
(PLS8-E and PLS8-US) is that something you would ship and roughly how
much more would that cost than the phone with one modem?

Purismā€™s answer (more or less what I was expecting)

We do intend to offer the possibility for a user to purchase several
modems, but at this moment we do not have any details about their cost.

My interpretation is that it shows intent to make it possible to buy multiple modems, but they havenā€™t worked out the details yet, so canā€™t publicly commit to anything concrete.

For anyone who has/will pre-order - my guess is that if both modem variants are available when pre-orders start to ship and you let them know that want a second modem, they will give you a mechanism to order the second modem and ship it in the same parcel as the handset (Purism ship internationally for free, so itā€™s to their advantage to combine both into one parcel).

Personally, like some of the other folks here, I will probably wait and see. This is about twice the price of my current phone. I support the philosophy behind Librem 5, but I would be pretty aggravated to pay twice the price and get less satisfactory performance than my current phone on my most common use cases.

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