Mobile Carriers in the United States

[natasha]

It's possible that different accounts have different RF band permission.  For instance, an AT&T unlimited plan might work different than a "pay as you go" plan or various plans with AT&T network MVNOs.

So you pretty much have to try out each plan on each service to know if it's going to work.

I don't have a PinePhone, but I've done the "bring your own device" thing on discount MVNOs about a dozen times over the years.  So I've run into these "gotchas" a lot.  Sometimes it's possible to find the actual technical restrictions of a given plan, sometimes it is not.

These appear to be the bands the PinePhone will work on:

Code:

LTE: B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, B7, B8, B12, B13, B18, B19, B20, B25, B26, B28, B38, B39, B40, B41
WCDMA: B1, B2, B4, B5, B6, B8, B19
GSM: 850, 900, 1800, 1900 (MHz)

Are there current software restrictions on this?
At least you can mostly eliminate some plans just knowing this.

I am not sure I fully understand what you are saying.
In your example, AT&T has different plans, but they should all use the same network, or not?
I thought the phone networks were dependent on the carrier (Verizon, AT&T, etc).
Are you saying that knowing the carrier is not enough to know if it is going to work or not?
Same question but from another angle. Can AT&T (or any other carrier) change network type depending on the plan?

Can you please clarify on this?

What he's trying to say is that some devices are limited to which bands they can access. It is not based on plan, but on device. For instance, when t-mobile took over sprint they bricked band 41 for all but new 5g devices because spectrum sharing has not worked out yet.

What they can do is prioritize traffic based on plan (by apn) which can slow your speeds. But if your modem is capable, you will get access to the band unless they have a specific whitelist of block device imei's that are allowed or not - which verizon and AT&T do. In those cases, network access is blocked by device imei, not by plan. Usually this is done because a device does not meet the carriers access requirements, such as all the devices that are about to get kicked off because of no VoLTE support. The pinephone does have support for VoLTE, but whitelisting may still be an issue. T-mobile does not use whitelists.

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Since it looks the limiting factor is the hardware, not sure is the OS would make any difference. Meaning, if a carrier works for UB ports have to work also for the rest of OS distributions... (and vice versa).