FOSDEM 19 Announcements Discussion

[trainailleur]

For the PinePhone LTE module, have you determined which variant will be used in the US/North American model yet? If possible I'd like to see the EC25-AF variant used because it supports band 71 which is important for getting full access to T-Mobile US's LTE network (there are large areas of their network that only have service on band 71). That variant also apparently supports Verizon's LTE network (which the -A variant does not) which would significantly increase the potential customer base for the device (as Verizon is the largest carrier in the US). Thanks

Thanks for the useful info, will explore with Quectel on the EC25-AF variant. If the cost price same as EC25-A, for sure will consider EC25-AF.

While I doubt the accuracy of the non-US information in this page, Phone Arena has a good list of US LTE bands by carrier:

Cheat sheet: which 4G LTE bands do AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint use in the USA?

And here is a breakdown of the US carriers by size:

Number of subscribers to wireless carriers in the U.S. from 1st quarter 2013 to 3rd quarter 2018, by carrier (in millions)

The best bands vary by carrier, and the bands they have outside of cities tend to be the most critical.  AT&T has the largest GSM network in the US and likely has the largest LTE user base.  Bands 12 or 17 are essential for AT&T coverage across the US (as I understand it, band 12 is a superset of band 17).

Sprint and Verizon are historically CDMA carriers, and never having had a CDMA phone, I'm unsure of how broad their coverage is, though from using their data cards at times, in the cities their LTE coverage seems fine.

T-Mobile are said to have the fastest LTE network in the US, but with around 80 million subscribed lines, they have only around half as many subscribers as AT&T or Verizon, both of whom have around 150 million subscribed lines.

May we assume that the modem, whichever the phone turns out to ship with, will be user-replaceable?  That would be a very valuable feature for world travelers unless you opt for the EC25-G.