And just like that, Holidays are over and kids are back to school. I’m sure you’ve heard of the brand Nokia – they are definitely back in the market and has some great BTS tech that you might want to consider.
On the show this week, we invited Brenden Folitarik Country Manager HMD Global ANZ and Pacific Islands who shared some BTS tech from Nokia.
The Nokia X30 and G60 Android smartphones and T20 Android tablet may just be what you need. Great brand, uses Pure Android, long 3-year warranty, and very keen prices are just the start. READ MORE..
I just came back from a month-long US trip and had some realizations and personal experience about International Roaming.
In line with this, I invited Alex Choros Managing Editor Whistleout to talk about roaming options for your next travel.
Currently, At&t has a requirement in place that smart phones that want to make calls on their network must be ‘certified compliant’. What does this mean? Well, a phone maker will engage a lab to run a lot of tests on your model of phone and once it passes, will achieve certified compliance for making calls on the 4g network (VoLTE). Ofcourse there is major cost to the lab in running these tests and as such not all companies are prepared to pay this, just so the handset will work on At&t. You can look up here if your phone SHOULD work, but sadly you don’t know until you land in the USA if it will. My wife has the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and its listed as being compliant, but it didnt work for calls on At&t VoLTE.
I took a range of modern smart phones on my trip, like the Oppo Find X5 Pro, and none of them worked. Why At&t has done this is beyond me, but this policy sent me running to a T-Mobile store (cursing the name At&t) disabling my Vodafone sim and installing a T-mobile sim card. After doing so i achieved sensational coverage and data speeds across the states i visited, including Nevada, Utah, California and Hawaii. For $60 Aud i was able to use my handset for the month, including phone calls, hassle free.
I still needed to check voice mail and sms of my Australian sim, but that was conducted by deactivating my T-mobile sim, activating my Australian sim, setting the phone to airplane mode and connecting to a wifi network. I could then send sms, check voicemail and make phone calls like I was in Australia.
You might wonder why we have not experienced the same issue in Australia? The good news is that Australian mobile companies don’t lock their networks. This is likely because we are too small a market and if phone makers were required to run expensive lab tests to connect to the network many would simply stop selling devices here and leave. This would reduce choice and go against the federal government policy of encouraging competition.
I was amazed that there has been nothing discussed about this, but it will remain an issue while At&t maintains their VoLTE certification requirements and Australian Mobile companies choose At&t as their primary roaming partner for customers.
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