Rogers Canada No Go

Hardware Librem 5
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So my battles with getting VoLTE to work on my L5 has come to a final conclusion and it isn’t pretty.

For background I work for a small telco north of Lake Superior who’s partnered with Roger’s Canada, we are essentially Rogers in terms of our cellular network.

I found out today from one of our tech support people talking to a Rogers equivalent that they will not support any gray market devices, and you guessed it, the L5 is considered grey market. What that means is when they detect my SIM going into the L5 they will disable VoLTE, so unless they change their minds about it I’m out of luck here in the great white north when they finally force us all to use VoLTE and shut off HSPA.

What is really ironic is that the AWESim service uses the AT&T network in the US, who is the US roaming partner for Rogers. Also ironic is that they have a BYOD plan (Bring Your Own Device) which now seems more like BYOD that we approve of.

I also know of another engineer in our building that bought a Pixel phone and had a hell of a time geting VoLTE to work for him and cannot get VoWiFi to work at all. It looks like they are putting the squeeze on any device they consider rogue because you can put ROM’s on the Pixel. I guess I could look at using a VoIP client and that would be my only option.

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As the Librem 5 it is unique, the sim detect same gsm module not the Librem 5 itself.

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Or Soprani.ca 's JMP.chat with their physical data SIM? (They have eSIM adapters now, too, but they’re sold out of the test units. That’s a physical SIM card that you can load eSIMs onto.)

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Yeah I guess that’s what I’m going to have to do. Can you port your number to them?

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Yes. See bottom of page: https://jmp.chat/

What other carries besides Rogers would have worked in your area(s)?

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I do not know…I’ve only ever dealt with Rogers because I get a discount on my service through work here.

The carriers here are: Rogers, Bell, Telus, Kudo and some other smaller resellers which are essentially using one of those big three networks anyways.

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Koodo didn’t seem to mind @Sharon 's Librem 5, although she had problems getting it to work, possibly because of issues with her particular L5.

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I don’t think I would port my number because then I would lose my data plan with my company. They don’t seem to mind me using LTE data just not VoLTE. So I guess what I could do is forward my number to a jmp number I guess…

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I guess if more and more providers do this then eventually cellular modem suppliers will be forced to provide use control over the IMEI. If nothing else, it would be very useful to be able to try that in order to see whether it works around the problem.

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What I don’t understand is why do they have their panties in a bunch about VoLTE? If my phone is such a threat to the network, why allow it on at all? I get LTE data but not VoLTE? Makes no sense to me.

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I found out something interesting about Rogers. So they also consider iPhone’s to be grey market if you can believe that, but because Apple is the juggernaut that it is, they basically dictate to Rogers and AT&T which are smaller companies, the way it is going to be. I wonder if that is the same with AT&T?

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Correct - until Koodo (Telus) announced that they were making changes effective Feb, 17(?) 2024. Phones older than 6 years might have issues - but they will gladly sell/rent/lease any of the duopolies the carrier supports. Koodo were vague as to what those changes were/are.

I read here that Volte might be a issue with carriers. After the last flash (of nine) there was no volte installed. So remembering that months ago, aide here suggested I install Volte. Installed Volte the other day. No change to texts with data.

I also read hereabouts that MMS is a problem and should use something else. That is my understanding of the technical discussion on it.
Then why do we need to set MMSc in Chat!

[begin rant]
These “gray” area phones, I gather, are non duopoly phones. I read in to what telcoms are doing is that if the phone is private and can’t be stalked, then they are not allowed on their networks.
I posted a rant w/ more detail about that somewhere here.

Now I see that @raenrfm might use

Jmp.chat, IMO, is just another thing we need to pay $'s for some semblance of privacy.
Factor in the cost of the privacy-prone phone, the learning curve, mood elevator meds, anti-spyware, anti-trackers, anti-malware, anti-virus, and giving up one’s rights to privacy are an easy path-of-least-resistance for most.

There has been, in my opinion, a battle of telcoms jostling for control of devices we rent. Too, we have Micro$oft & Google, vying for control of the Internet and those that use it.

Holding on to any remaining rights to privacy is getting very expensive. IMO we pay too much for things we don’t need or want.
Too, I feel that if they want to tell us what we want to buy, an they want to sell our privacy to marketeers, than the cost of any phone and Internet high speed should be in exchange for us dropping out rights. They should be paying us.
[/rant]
~s

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Considering that Purism negotiated a deal with AT&T in the US, I would hope that they turn their focus on Canada and negotiate a deal with one of the carriers here, I would sign up for it if that were the case, although I would lose out on my discount, but if from what I hear that they are going to turn off HSPA in March of 2025, my days are numbered for using the phone as a phone on this network unless they realize just how many other people with devices that are not even LTE capable. Like embedded modems in machines, POS devices etc…it’s a bit more complicated than it seems.

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Didn’t you say that you work for them? You tell us?

I think there could be some subtle reasons to distinguish between general LTE data and VoLTE. However I don’t believe that any device should be excluded from the network, even if the device does not work properly, unless it is interfering with the operation of the network to a degree that would justify excluding the device.

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Its complicated. I work for a small telco who is a partner with Rogers. We use their core but dont control it. It was explained further that the LTE core is different than the VoLTE core which makes sense because its data vs SIP traffic, so their could be different teams that have different rules about devices.

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Does that LTE not VoLTE about the L5 working with LTE and if so, can you explain how you use just LTE?

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LTE is just data no voice. VoLTE is Voice over LTE. That traffic gets routed to the voice core of the network.

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