We're Being Screwed by Mobile Carriers...because of 5G!

it's all very confusing to most people phones being cut off from service because they're 3g then phones that are lte are being cut off from service as well replacement phones you switch to are not working supposedly even a new phone from last year carrier tech support cannot get your replacement phones running and quickly claim that your phone is incompatible what's up folks although this is not specifically a privacy issue it impacts my followers directly because many are changing phones and buying my new brax to phone for example what i will explain today are the details discussing what the heck these carriers are talking about some of it is very bad communications on their part and not really explaining what's wrong and these moves specifically in the usa ban a lot more phones than ever and have hurt a lot of people then combine this with incompetent tech support and we have a phone care crisis if you want to build your understanding of the carrier services their terminology to see if your phone is really compatible stay right there if you have a brax two phone i'll give you specific specs that can help you deal with these carriers at the end of the video although these problems are common to all phones i'm on the platform odyssey.com and i'm now one of the top creators on there in case i get the platform please follow me there using the link in the description and also join my app brax me which is a privacy focused social media my company offers protective tools like a vpn braxmail and now we have officially begun shipping the braxto privacy phone which is a phone that does not reveal your identity if you're interested in keeping your identity and information private these products are on my app brax me the link is in the description the reason phone carriers are causing a lot of stress for all of us it's because of 5g yeah that 5g the one that many of us don't even want to use in the interest of being able to say that a phone carrier has 5g these carriers have actually been scavenging the older frequencies and freeing them up so they can say they have 5g services in reality this is not true 5g promised to us that is still in the works and that upcoming service is being called 5g plus but because they have to free up frequencies for this 5g they're actually kicking out phone models from those frequencies and some of these are phones that are not that old like vintage 2019 or a little over three years old and some are even one year old this folks is very aggressive who would have thought in the past that you can't own a phone for more than three years and if you bought the phone used then you are totally screwed because the lifetime of the phone can be as short as one year unfortunately these phone carriers have communicated the issue very badly and even worse they're actually kicking out phones that are actually compatible and people are accepting this because they don't understand what's being said to them with all the technical mumbo jumbo phones speak even people with a computer tech background cannot decipher the scarier speak and folks it is the carrier's fault that we are confused and it is the cares fault that one rep will say that a phone is compatible and another will say it is not the same sucking carrier and the poor customer is left confused and angry and often forced to buy a new phone maybe it's intentional so they can force you into a new phone in any case there's a lot of bad blood in order to explain what's going on we'll have to introduce you to phone tech speak and make you understand their lingo this way you can argue with a specific rep that's likely giving you wrong information in my experience i've found that people have been given wrong information as much as 20 of the time but you will be able to defend yourself with this video but before i do that let's talk about who the carriers are in reality in the usa there are only three mobile phone carriers these are at t verizon and t-mobile i know that many of you are scratching your heads because you use mint cricket boost google fi ting us cellular on and on aren't these carriers first terminology to introduce to you these three sellers of phone services are called mvnos or mobile virtual network operators each mvno sells for another carrier so you have to know which carrier they're reselling for often they don't tell you because it's supposed to be a secret yeah right everyone knows so they're wasting their time here are some common ones boost at t consumer seller at t cricket att google 5t mobile hdot mobile metro t-mobile mint t-mobile net 10 all pure talk at t ting t-mobile and now verizon as you can see they only deal with three companies so always know which carrier you're actually dealing with since the policies on the phones emanate from that carrier now let's talk about the specific phone service categories offered by these carriers in simple terms the services we are concerned about have been labeled as 3g 4g and 5g most of you have heard of this but then you hear 3g umts 3g spda lte lte advance and you really will get screwed up in general we can ignore all these other terms because they can all fit into the general classification of 3g 4g and 5g the only exception will be the most common service which is now lte 4g and lte are the exact same thing so let's refashion our carrier services as 3g lte which is 4g and 5g most of you are on lte the terms 3g 4g and 5g are marketing terms which stand for the generation of tech so fifth generation phone tag is called 5g it doesn't actually indicate the tech being used in fact what is being advertised as 5g is actually just lte advanced true 5g is still in the baby stage and has limited availability 5g is supposed to be the new high speed internet tech you can have on your phone basically dsl or higher speeds on mobile phone in theory to achieve this 5g was expected to use a higher bandwidth frequency meaning wider channels to accommodate more traffic but to do this 5g has to use the higher frequencies most phone traffic in the past was in the 700 megahertz range to right below 2 gigahertz 5g would allow more traffic because they would use frequencies that are currently hardly used and these are in the ranges like 39 gigahertz they are also reserving frequencies above 3 gigahertz this is called millimeter wave technology this was the solidwood 5g fast internet with millimeter waves but this technology has limitations it has very short range in its line of sight only so it requires more towers and requires supplementary frequencies when millimeter wave is not accessible like indoors and the reality is that millimeter wave towers are not yet widely available most of these are just being tested in metro areas and very few phones support them but the carriers marketing department need a win they need to say they have 5g so they came up with an interim solution to fake 5g by claiming higher bandwidth and from personal experience the higher bandwidth claim is not here in order to get higher traffic bandwidth on your phone traffic cell traffic uses multiple frequencies simultaneously this is called carrier aggregation so by sending your data over multiple channels simultaneously you perceive more speed this is what they're marketing as 5g this technology is really better characterized as lte plus or lte advanced because the base technology is still lte you just do multiple lte channels and this is where the problem arose because the carriers don't have the millimeter wave technology completely figured out their marketing departments are committed to stating they have 5g the only way to fake 5g is to use carrier aggregation and that means they need more frequencies well there lies a problem frequencies are hard to get one of the reasons that phone companies are bought and sold frequently and that there are frequent mergers is because of frequencies t-mobile lately bought sprint and thus t-mobile now has the sprint frequencies you will notice too that t-mobile is the one least in a rush to push people out of existing frequencies and that's because the frequencies are available so where is the crisis currently in phone service the crisis is in 3g all phones that support only 3g will be disconnected att says they will be disconnected on march 31 2022 so a few days from now all carriers stop accepting new phones with 3g over a year ago or even earlier with verizon in order to push through with the availability of 5g they have to free up the frequencies currently used for 3g and make sure to switch them over to lte for use with lte carrier aggregation also called lt advanced or what i call fake 5g this has caused carriers to tell you that your lte phone is no longer supported because it does not have voice over lte and most of us reacted by saying what tazak is voiceover lte my phone is lte it says so on the settings it says so in the specs what is this voiceover lte or the shortcut name volte and another issue you will find is that the carrier will say that your phone does not support band 12 therefore it cannot go on our network i will teach you what this all means and in many cases many many cases the carrier is wrong and if your phone is from late 2018 to 2020 then your phone is supported and they are just screwing with you i'll tell you later how to get around this but don't blame your phone i understand that carriers have to deal with competitive forces and they need to make themselves sound better than the other carriers but this push towards 5g is very damaging and to be honest with minimal practical benefit for example i have a hot spot netgear m1 which uses lte advanced or really carrier aggregation or what i call fake 5g and service sucks doing carrier aggregation is great in theory if all frequencies are available in your area so the 5g device does not perform any better in rural areas where service was spotty to begin with there's no particular benefit to this 5 gbs since spotty surface on 4g is spotty surface on fake 5g and rural areas cannot benefit from the potential of real 5g millimeter wave because millimeter wave works only in shorter distances so it has to be in an urban area the rest will be on lte for the foreseeable future the immediate damage to consumers is that this is the first time that newer phones are rendered incompatible and as frequencies are shifted this may not be the last time this will happen now what exactly is the reason why phones from 2018 to 2020 have been classified as incompatible many of the models in question are popular models like motorola g7s and oneplus 6s and oneplus 7s and other phones from smaller manufacturers all of these models are actually compatible and are being blocked and it's a particularly significant problem for me because i sold many moto g7s and oneplus phones why are many models being denied access to the phone networks the main issue is that support for 3g is being dropped so this should be obvious all fonts made prior to 2014 or so can no longer be used when the carriers first communicated that 3g was being dropped this i think was pretty clear to most consumers and the newest of these models are 8 years old with most being 10 years old or more but here's something that most people did not know many phones made since 2014 that had lte were actually hybrid phones the phones used lte for the data portion but the voice was using the regular voice analog frequencies which was reserved for 3g channels the newer lte phones had no voice frequency channel the phone sent voice data digitally through lte the phones capable of sending voice data digitally are called volte capable phones so now all carriers are dropping support not just for 3g data but also for 3g voice or more specifically analog voice why because they occupy frequencies they want to free up for use with fake 5g or as i said earlier carrier aggregation the problem is that these carriers don't actually know which phones have voice over lte or maybe they don't want to know maybe the sales reps make a commission on a new phone so they'd rather just drop you from the carrier if they're not going to get their new phone commission either way it is very rampant that many many phone models that are from 2019 to 2020 are being classified as incompatible these phones are two to three years old just as an example many of my customers with a moto g7 plus were being told by at t that it did not have voice over lte well how interesting because t-mobile was selling this model last year under the brand name revelry and to further prove the point of how screwed up this is i go to settings on a moto g7 plus and there's a switch there to enable volte same with a moto g7 atm t block these variations of moto g7s this is frustrating as heck because it sucks that you can buy a brand new moto g7 plus on amazon and a tnt says it's not supported because of supposedly ancient features the fault here is with the carrier there is actually nothing wrong with the phone and my attitude is that if a carrier screws up with us then we dump them att currently is the worst offender in this from what i've been hearing it's almost like they're so lazy to figure out what phones actually work that they just block certain models without any actual proof that the models do not work we'll dump them and go to t-mobile they're pain too but much less now let me explain another issue with phone carriers the mainstream phones like iphones google pixels lg's and samsung's are not usually a problem though you can get a bad sales rep on some days that will again give you false information if they can't sell you a new phone but the new angle is to say that your phone is not supported because a particular lte band is not supported let me explain lte bands to you for a moment this discussion is not for 5g phones but if you have 4g or lte phones and you want to know if it's supported you just need to check if certain bands are covered you can search the internet for your phone specs to see what bans it supports the main band used by t-mobile is band 12 for lte since most phones are lte this is the one you need to be concerned about at least this is the band that they focus on for 4g lte phones att favors band 2 and apparently that's where most of the traffic is and some of it is in band 12 which is the same frequency as band 17. verizon i believe favorites band 2 and then band 4 and band 13. now these carriers support many other lte bands here's a complete list of usable bands by carrier the higher band numbers are actually just some variation on the same frequencies on the lower band so the main bands that most lte phones are concerned about would be 2 5 and 12 for t-mobile 2 and 12 for a tnt 17 is actually the same frequency as 12 2 4 and 13 for verizon the other lte bands are being used for carrier aggregation with 5g or fake 5g phones in the future if real 5g is completely up and running those phones will be talking on the higher frequencies like 39 gigahertz so they won't be affecting these lower frequencies in these bands below 2 gigahertz if you just got your braxton phone then these are the bands supported by it i'm listing all the bands including 3g so those in other countries can check with their area but just in general you can see that it supports 2 5 7 12 17 which are the major ones i just mentioned except for four as far as i can see the only area of concern is band 4 which it does not support in this first brax 2 version it appears to be a concern mostly for verizon the other carriers do not use band 4 much for lte they may have it allocated for 5g or fake 5g but verizon has alternate bands so i've seen the phone still work with verizon even with what i told you here you will call a carrier and they will say that your phone is not supported yeah you can arm yourself with information search the internet to see if your phone supports voice over lte volte sometimes even though the phone supports volte that feature needs to be enabled so go into your network settings and see if there's an enable volte setting on the phone that should be available in android 9 and above if there's no setting and network settings for your phone model but your phone model is volte capable try this dial that number right there that should set it now let's say your phone is positively supported because of everything i said here and you still end up arguing with your carrier representative this will be expected i told you most of these reps are completely untrained and uninformed the solution is to find a phone or borrow a phone that you can activate it doesn't matter if the phone is activated with another carrier or the same carrier does not matter for example if your wife has an iphone and it is supported by the carrier usually iphone 6 and up then you borrow it you contact the carrier for service and you get a sim card from them then activate the old phone with a sim card after that transfer the sim card over to the new phone and argument with the rep is eliminated as long as the proper bands are supported it has voice over lte capability and 4g it should be good to go that's assuming of course that there's coverage for that carrier in your area so if you don't have coverage that's when you have to switch to another one with service in your areas so that's the caveat that's not dependent on the sim card issues now i move sim cards from phone to phone a lot my braxto phone is dual sim so i can switch sim cards depending on what the purpose of my service is my braxto phones use t-mobile and ting ting is a t-mobile mvno did they give me a problem mostly i just transferred a sim card over so i skipped the argument and on one sim card it was not activated and it said incompatible then two hours later it was activated no explanation given so there you go life with these carriers is very difficult nowadays and the change to 5g has left them with mostly uneducated staff and we are the ones to suffer the consequences again i will call out the offending carrier the worst in service is a tnt so go to t-mobile thanks for watching you

Channel: Rob Braxman Tech

Views: 140,337

Keywords: internet privacy, tech privacy, privacy, de-googled phones, 5g, us telecom, phone carriers, phone carriers bad service

Id: BypJZRyu_xA

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 30 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/martini-meow]

Thank you for this.

[u/shatabee4]

We're being screwed. Period.

It never ends. Scam after scam.

Thanks Congress Both Parties for protecting consumers...