As many US customers know, having an unlocked factory device most of the time has it’s shortcomings. Ever since LTE emerged in US cellular market, many people found that their phones were not supported by carriers for a very important “feature” such as VoLTE - Voice over LTE. Even though, the device would be fully capable of VoLTE, carrier would not allow it, simply based on the IMEI reading, if it wasn’t on the “certified” list or “whitelisted” device. Lack of this VoLTE feature, can leave one completely without signal and fail to make/received phone calls, even if their LTE strength is at the highest level, while they are connected to it just fine-browsing the web/streaming videos,etc. As soon as the call is initiated, the device radios default - fall back to HSPA frequencies and if the signal is low or non existent (tower far enough/ surrounding area w enough obstacles), you are out of luck. No calls will go through.
I’ve been dealing with this, ever since I switched from Verizon to ATT, (“certified” list is much smaller) and my factory unlocked phone (had VoLTE on VZW) ended up useless in areas where I needed it the most, just because it wasn’t on the list-perfect LTE signal and crappy HSPA.
Many different forums were addressing this problem with both Verizon, ATT and T-Mobile and some of these carriers tried to do better, but not enough, because of their own incentive to sell their phones - branded, with OS tweaked by them.
However, they put some blame on manufacturers, saying that they never “submitted their specific device for required provisioning”. It was something about making sure that 911 calls are gonna go through under specific circumstances and so on. Carrier would need a lot of testing on the device in order to have it “certified”
So, my question here to you is,
Are you planning to submit Librem 5 Phone for this kind of provisioning and certification by major US carriers? Or will you be opened to it?
What a sick situation. Carriers should not be allowed to reject service arbitrarily. In Europe, I had never had such an issue with phones. I think the lawmakers did the right thing for once and cut down those practices on grounds of unfair competition.
Ugh! Phone has to conform to standards - for Librem 5, modem homologation takes care of that - and carries must provide service to any phone that is conforming.
You guys in the US have a lot of work to do, to make carries behave.
On a side note, Google is doing the same thing. My specific phone+cyanogenmod build can be found somewhere around page 400 on their whitelist. If yours is not whitelisted, they reserve the right to cut off all access to their services. The whitelist can change without notice.
Well, the Telecom companies here just like any other business, corp, etc are allowed legally to bribe the politicians (lobbying, campaign donations) and then expect them to legislate according to their needs , instead of what’s best in the public interest. That’s how we end up with various secretaries of departments, who were just before appointment representing/Working/benefiting from the company which was at odds with that specific government body - i.e. Coal Mining lobbyst now in charge of Environmental Protection Agency or former attorney for Verizon becoming a chief of Federal Communication Commission, etc. Not to mention, how many times the Congress or Senate representatives (mostly showered with Big Business money) voted for ridiculous laws , just to please their donors. That kind of corruption goes even more unnoticed on state levels.
“We the people” will change that soon - hopefully soon enough. By fighting for constitutional amendment to remove money from politics. Until then, our government will remain beholden to big corporate interests.
Not a problem. Someone simply needs to tweak/hack/program the Librem 5 phone & show how it’s done on these Forums, so as to trick the carrier into thinking the phone is “VoLTE certfied” officially,
and a middle finger & a big “kiss my ass” unofficially.
I really hope we see that happen.
Here is the issue - from my own experience and of many in forums. It’s all based on IMEI numbers. If the carrier reads it as certified it’s all good. So, what many of us (w unlocked phones) do is that no matter what, we are required to call customer service and request the IMEI change in account, because it’s “not showing the right one” and we give any random imei that we know for sure is from a carrier branded or certified device. What happens next, they update the info, ask us turn the phone off and back on and we have this feature fully functional. Now, if our unlocked device was indeed on their certified list , VoLTE will remain on as long as we don’t swap the SIM card with another device. Then, you gotta do it all over again. On the other hand, if the device wasn’t on the list, I may be able to make 1 call at the most and have the LTE on and after that , everything goes back to default and VoLTE won’t work again. I checked to see if the IMEI shown on the account changed. No, it was still showing the one belonging to the certified / branded device.
So, I see this as a bit of a difficult task to accomplish, but still hopeful. This community has enough gifted people to figure something out.
