I was just wondering since I read a few articles about it only possibly being compatible with AT&T amd Sprint, so I want to check.
thank you. I hope so, as Verizon has a monopoly where I live.
Upon putting my SIM card into my L5…I went to Verizon’s website to approve/authenticate the switch of my SIM from one card to the other, and Verizon’s site is telling me that the L5 is not compatible with their service? Anyone else currently running their L5 on the Verizon network?
I just got off the phone with Verizon. Based on the IMEI # of our L5 phones, Verizon does not support them at this time. The V tech i spoke with has no way of knowing if they will or will not be supported in the future.
I guess I might be going with Mint Mobile SIM cards for the future with this phone.
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Except Mint Mobile (T-mobile’s network) won’t activate a SIM in a non-VoLTE phone on their network.
If the SIM is already activated, it might get by for a while until T-mobile turns off your local 3G bands, at which point calls are most likely not going to connect or ring, or even go to voice mail, possibly. (That might already be happening in your area.)
Let’s hope VoLTE gets sorted out quickly for the BM818-A1!
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With my pinephone, I just swapped the sim card over and proceeded as normal. I never bothered with talking to Verizon.
Does your Pinephone have VoLTE?
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I guess I don’t know. It has LTE.
You can tell by making a call. If “LTE” or “4G” remains visible in the notifications area during the call, and doesn’t drop to “3G” or “H+” then you’re using Voice over LTE.
(Voice over cellular/telephony network is 3G or 2G. Voice over LTE is voice carried over the 4G/LTE data network.)
BTW, if you have a mobile setting similar to “Enable VoLTE” or “Enable Voice over LTE” or “Enable 4G calling,” then the phone can use VoLTE.
Interesting. The BM818-A1 must be recognizable as a VoLTE-capable modem (even if it’s not working as such yet in the L5).
Cool.
There remains the call connection issue, though.
Almost like @Gavaudan here. About a year ago, I activated Mint Mobile SIM in a spydroid and a TracFone SIM in the PinePhone. Both worked with VoLTE. A few months ago, I switched the SIMs – VoLTE still works in both phones.
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Ah, good to know. Thank you.
@Whe3zy Verizon will probably never support the L5 even if it gets VoLTE. From my experience they dislike supporting unlocked phones at all.
I noticed you responded to my comment in the other thread, so I’ll update that advice here. It used to be the case that you could activate a SIM card in an approved phone, switch it, and Verizon would be none the wiser. I tried doing this with my Pinephone though and after about a week of use my cell connection was changed to a data-only connection. At the same time, I got an email from Verizon saying my “account changes” had been processed. I logged in to my account and had a notification saying “here are the capabilities of your new device” with some other information, but long story short they realized something was up and disabled the phone functionality until I put the card back in my original phone.
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Maybe when we have a few thousand Verizon users in the US that have a Librem 5 and get shut off by Verizon, then a nice class action lawsuit against Verizon might be in order. Attorneys love class action lawsuits against cell phone service providers. If the phone has an FCC certification, then Verizon should have no choice but to accept that phone on to its network. Anything less is an anti-trust violation by Verizon. Verizon loves to charge for services (like they have with hot spot and spam blocking in the past) that should be free. They often use their monopoly power to force subscribers to buy more from them instead of getting any product or service elsewhere. They really need to be sued for these practices at every opportunity.
Yeah, I didn’t remember to mention that both of my SIMs were MVNO to T-Mobile.
If Verizon sold a data-only SIM with reasonable data plan, I’d be happy to use them with the L5 – if we have calls and text bridged to the telephone network, and E2E encrypted voice and SMS/MMS for endpoints that support it. Verizon has great coverage and data speed, even when throttled.
Sounds similar to my setup, I’ve been using a prepaid T-Mobile plan that’s the cheapest I could find ($15/month) and at least at the time I set up the account they had no problem activating my “Quectel EG25-G modem.” Haven’t had a problem since then.
I can verify that the Librem 5 does not work with Verizon, despite supposedly being able to access band 13. The people at the Verizon store tried really hard, but it does not work. I ended up switching to AweSIM, which worked just fine until the third-party issue.
@smd0665, I added your info to https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Cellular-Providers
(Nice username by the way! Was it inspired by a particular component like this or this?)