So does this mean we will have to wait for Librum Dial?
Couldn’t we use this as a no carrier phone immediately on day one with Matrix?
I haven’t used Matrix, but I believe that was Todd’s original plan. Will this not be a possibility? If Im gonna use it as a WiFi only phone, I want to do that on day one so the phone wouldn’t ever have been tied to my IRL name via a carrier.
I have noticed that instead of calling Purism’s products/services correctly “Librem” you call them “Librum”? Any reason for this? As you write this consistently except for one or two exceptions I wonder why since you are otherwise articulate and detailed in your responses.
You could use Matrix. I’ve used that on my iPhone to make calls.
Getting friends onto Matrix would be a challenge. They are used to WhatsApp or FB Messenger and don’t want to change.
A phone # is like email. You can send email from any provider to any provider. With a phone #, you can text/call from any carrier to any carrier. I’m not on FB, so with some friends I either text or call (or occasionally email).
That’s where having an actual number is an advantage.
A no carrier phone was possible before, but not in the same way being discussed by Purism. (I guess when google offered VOIP numbers that would count, but I’m not sure about how you registered for those numbers.)
Librem Dail will give you a number, I’m guessing, that will work with normal telephone systems. This is a big difference.
Outside of this, yes, you could today, just buy a data sim card, and not have a phone number on your phone. You would then use VOIP apps for calling. Would work pretty well already. With what Purism is proposing it would work even better, and would be a great solution.
I wondered about the same thing, as he knew a lot about roman eagles I assume that it’s not the lack of knowledge of roman Latin.
Had the same thought. But many misspell it exactly that way. I assume mostly native speakers that spell it the way it sounds in their head. Like similar sounding words. Like… uh… pandemonium? Conundrum? No idea 
Edit: oh, how bout elements. Helium, Uranium…
Lithium seems close.
This linked blog post answered one of my questions that made me hesitant to buy the device. I couldn’t see any information that I could understand that would indicate what wireless service provider’s I could use. I was worried that I might need to use Verizon. Today I have a Fi account and it straddles the T-Mobile and Sprint networks. I was guessing that any factory-unlocked phone would work at any carrier, but I have had places say that they couldn’t allow a particular device.
I never had the knowledge of prepaid data SIM’s before. That sounds interesting. My plan was to port over my old cell number from a MagicJack VoIP to the Librem 5. Seems I can do that or maybe some magic forwarding thing to have the Librem 5 pass calls through that VoIP number.
I typo things and am a bad speller. That’s all.
I don’t think you can win here, the text below this thread is also spelling “dail” instad of “dial”.
I like the idea about chemical elements.
It is a new element called “Librum”, or “Librium”, and maybe “Lr” or “Lb” ?
↑Oh no Lr is already taken by Lawrencium the 103rd.
↑Lb is a good one. Librium, the element of libre. Cool.
to me this just sounds like adding more centralised-ness to the already centralised www.
Alright, that explains it then, thank you
I wasn’t out to win anything, it honestly just puzzled me.
No problem here, 30 years as a military admin. I can smell bad spelling at 30 yards, I get puzzled too.
The implication seems to be that it will be easy to switch to a different dial-out provider, of which there are plenty. (Mostly marketed towards businesses who want to use VoIP for all their telephony.) This is a good thing.
In my interpretation, “No-Carrier” (presumably not to be confused with NO CARRIER) basically means you want to decouple your ability to dial out into the PSTN from your network connection, whether that network is a cellular network, WiFi, or something else entirely.
When Todd mentioned that the one disadvantage of going “over-the-top” is that there are some situations where a native GSM call will still work but VoIP will not, it made me think of an existing service that could provide the best of both worlds; your ability to dial-out can be decoupled from your network connection while retaining the ability to place native GSM phone calls. It’s called SIP2SIM®, from Andrews & Arnold. You get a SIM card from them which lets you make GSM phone calls, but, after travelling through the GSM network, the calls go via the SIP server of your choice instead of directly to the PSTN.
In practice, SIP2SIM is probably not economical for most individuals who don’t want to use it as part of a business phone system. (In addition to the call charges, data is not very cheap on the SIP2SIM SIMs.)