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by throwawaysea 2379 days ago
Will this work with US carriers? I am not clear on whether there are limitations imposed by carriers to only allow "certified" phones.
2 comments

Drew lives in Philadelphia, and he notes that it works, so yes.

Here's a tip, though, if you ever get concerned about whether or not a phone will work with your carrier. Check what modem it has. In the PinePhone's case, it's the EG25-G.

http://files.pine64.org/doc/datasheet/project_anakin/LTE_mod...

So now that we know the name, let's look and see if your carrier mentions it as one it approves. For the sake of brevity, I'll assume you're on AT&T.

https://www.att.com/modules

Google's cache nicely and conveniently converts spreadsheets into web documents, so let's view it on that:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G7My6z...

The EG25-G is #51, and is fully supported.

This was a discussion with the Librem 5. I know that T-mobile USA does not whitelist phones (My Librem 5 makes calls, sends/recieves SMS, and gets LTE data on T-mobile). Calls/SMS don't work on LTE though (I think due to proprietary software, that is true at least on Android). The Pinephone Braveheart Edition is compatible with most of the LTE/3G/2G bands for T-Mobile.

However, I think Verizon at the least used to do this, and may still do it. Sprint also has some extra proprietary things on Android and I don't know their functionality.