Will there be 5G modems available for Librem 5?

Hardware
1

AT&T is telling me I need to shift to 5G and has already shipped me a free phone.

I am worried that my LibRem 5 will arrive after AT&T has switched off support for non-5G modems.

Are there any certified discrete 5G modems available?

2

I seriously doubt that any U.S. carrier will switch off 4G any time soon. I wouldn’t place too much stock in AT&T’s marketing. I’m on an MVNO that runs on AT&T’s network, and there has been no such communication. It’s also widely known that 5G is just not very widespread yet.

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While I personally don’t care much about 5G speeds and will be plenty happy with 4G and VOLTE support, can we agree that it’s awesome that this phone will have the capability for us to order a 5G modem (if and when that comes) and install it ourselves, rather than force us to upgrade to a new device?

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4

If AT&T gave you a free phone, it is unlikely to be 5G. I suspect that AT&T is telling you that you need to upgrade to a phone that supports VoLTE (which is a 4G technology), not that you need to upgrade to 5G.

There aren’t any currently, because 5G modems require more cooling than can be provided by a 29x33x2 mm heat spreader on an M.2 card. The industry may eventually figure out how to do it, but I wouldn’t count on it happening any time soon. Another issue is that the new mmWave bands (>24GHz) required different antennas, so you can only do low-band and mid-band 5G, which isn’t that big of a loss in my opinion, but it does limit you in some countries like the US that are using mmWave 5G.

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5

Unfortunately not. In another part of this forum I asked same question some months ago and I received negative answer.
Regards AT&T giving you a new 5g phone, if it’s true, it’s The Great surveillance capitalism Proof!!
Personally I rejected domotics and other stuff just for it!!

6

BTW, AT&T hasn’t even shut down its 3G network yet, much less 4G.
(3G is to allegedly shut down in 2022 on AT&T.)

7

Currently ModemManager the Google Telephony Library that is using Librem 5 just support Basic 5G.
However phosh 0.35.0 add Basic 5G support too.

Released January 2024

  • Indicate 5G when detected

Purism Free Software & Community.

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