Sim cards and carriers, discussion

[rocket2nfinity]

I've been having trouble connecting my PinePhone (Manjaro) to my AT&T service (4G, Eastern US). A summary of my experiences (currently running Arch, but there was no real difference from Manjaro)...

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In talking to an AT&T tech for a little while, he suggested that he could manually enter the IMEI. While exploring this option, he noticed that AT&T seems to consider the Quectel Modem (model EG25-G, at least) to be an "internet only" (or "data only") device, that AT&T wouldn't support phone calls and SMS messages on it, and this might be the source of the problem. I didn't want to mess up my existing line, so we ended up not trying the manual IMEI registration.

Disappointing, but maybe informative. Has anyone had a similar experience?

I have an Inland Cellular SIM card. Inland is NOT an MVNO and Inland owns the only towers and provides the only cellular service in my part of rural Idaho, US.

My PinePhone receives an Inland 4G signal and Internet data works, but voice and SMS text are completely non-functional (inbound and outbound). I really wanted PinePhone to work and I'm very disappointed. (I will give up mobile phones entirely rather than use a spy phone, even though the telecom networks still spy on those of us with PinePhones anyway.)

I also tried an old, no longer subscribed Verizon SIM card some miles away where Verizon towers are visible. It too produced a good 4G signal bar indication, but I have no idea whether or not Verizon would work because the subscription has expired.

I posted more details here: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=12147

Several people have gotten verizon to work completely including calls in multiple forum threads.

Need more details about Inland to troubleshoot. Are they gsm, cdma, or 4g LTE only?

Edit: See your other thread