More than a decade after launching in Europe, the Netherlands company is now selling its repairable phones in the US, starting with the Fairphone (Gen 6+).
That phone claiming US/western hemisphere support is laughable.
It supports T-Mobile native bands, but without more extensive band support, domestic roaming will not be the best. (Some LTEiRA markets T-Mobile can currently roam on Verizon thanks to the USCC acquisition, for example. No band 13, no go.)
14 is basically the only way to get signal in markets where AT&T doesn’t have 5 or 12 licenses, like 2/3 of Nebraska.
n260/n261 are big at venues, airports, etc. The lack of those mmWave bands will affect coverage in high-density locations on all three carriers.
Even if it did support Verizon, without band 13 in the modem, Verizon’s low-band nationwide band, it’d be a mostly-brick.
All three carriers require some kind of certification to be allowed on carrier networks (which alone should be illegal as they do it as a tactic to control the phone market.) Not just Verizon. (Verizon, at least, has a web site of certified devices: https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/device-showcase and it’s quite broad.)
Ironically, it will probably work with Verizon, even the BlackBerry Key2 does without certification. It just falls back to a very basic profile for flip phones. They don’t tend to actively block phones like AT&T does.
Basically, it’s a T-Mobile-on-network-only phone. Things are going greeeeeat over at that carrier right now with the tens of thousands of layoffs and forcing customer plan changes even on grandfathered plans.
That phone claiming US/western hemisphere support is laughable.
It supports T-Mobile native bands, but without more extensive band support, domestic roaming will not be the best. (Some LTEiRA markets T-Mobile can currently roam on Verizon thanks to the USCC acquisition, for example. No band 13, no go.)
I’d not really claim it supports AT&T either. It’s missing band 14, 29, 30, 46, 48, n260, n261. It’s also not on AT&T’s list of supported phones: https://www.att.com/scmsassets/images/support/pdf/Devices-Working-on-ATT-Network.pdf
14 is basically the only way to get signal in markets where AT&T doesn’t have 5 or 12 licenses, like 2/3 of Nebraska.
n260/n261 are big at venues, airports, etc. The lack of those mmWave bands will affect coverage in high-density locations on all three carriers.
Even if it did support Verizon, without band 13 in the modem, Verizon’s low-band nationwide band, it’d be a mostly-brick.
All three carriers require some kind of certification to be allowed on carrier networks (which alone should be illegal as they do it as a tactic to control the phone market.) Not just Verizon. (Verizon, at least, has a web site of certified devices: https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/device-showcase and it’s quite broad.)
Ironically, it will probably work with Verizon, even the BlackBerry Key2 does without certification. It just falls back to a very basic profile for flip phones. They don’t tend to actively block phones like AT&T does.
Basically, it’s a T-Mobile-on-network-only phone. Things are going greeeeeat over at that carrier right now with the tens of thousands of layoffs and forcing customer plan changes even on grandfathered plans.