Support for 4G internationally

Hardware Librem 5
1

I travel sometimes and it would be nice to kbow if the phone will be capable of functioning properly in the whole of Europe, China, north Africa, Iraq and Saudia Arabia.

2

Here’s the info you need: https://puri.sm/faq/#faq-WillmyexistingSIMcardworkWhatcountriesandnetworkswillbesupported

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4

Everything about the post on what countries it works in is ridiculously unfriendly. I’m not searching through all the different carrier services to find each number and see if the phone is compatible with it with there also being 2 types to choose from for the phone. That’s plain lazy.
edit: others are lazy too but still :frowning:

5

If you can’t be bothered to search through it for the sake of your own use, why should anyone else do it for you?

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6

Don’t then :slight_smile:

7

No, you’re focusing (yourself) on something that is not an issue. Ridiculously unfriendly is environment we live in as here we are having choice of just a few cellular chips that support voice on Linux.

For Northern Africa you’ll need modem that covers LTE (4G) Frequency Bands: B3, B7 and B20 and UMTS (3G) Frequency Bands: B1 and B8.

Iraq: https://halberdbastion.com/intelligence/countries-nations/iraq
Saudi Arabia: https://halberdbastion.com/intelligence/countries-nations/saudi-arabia

8

That is the world in which we live. Countries don’t work together to ensure that every country just uses the same bands. That would be too sensible.

Network operators don’t work together to use the same band because they would then interfere with each other. By having multiple bands, you get more network operators (more choice, more competition, hopefully lower prices) and more total bandwidth and, yes, government gets more revenue.

You also need multiple bands to support big countries (need lower frequency with greater coverage area and lower bandwidth for wide open areas - and higher frequency with lower coverage area and higher bandwidth for areas with people packed in like sardines, or for small countries).

(Look on the bright side. Countries do at least work together so that the phone works at all in more than one country! That is an improvement over the early days where Europe had one standard and the US had a different standard.)

Using the table, you can see that no one module works on all the listed bands. So your next questions could be:

  • What is the minimum number of modules that I would need to buy that would together cover all the listed bands? (I believe that for 4G, the answer is “2” i.e. the two BroadMobi modules.), and

  • Do I have the skills to change the module over? (That is the point of a removable / replaceable module.)

As far as I know, there is no removable (M.2) module that supports all bands in one module. If you find one, noone is telling you not to use it or stopping you from using it. That’s not what the “open” world is about. Perhaps in the future there will be such an M.2 module.

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