I am trying to set up a plan with a smaller carrier, but I have a feeling that since they are not on Google’s allowlist (even though I live in Canada), they will not let me use 5G with them. The Pixel watch supported carrier list also makes no sense, because for some reason the new carriers for the watch 2 don’t support the first version? I was thinking about switching to Samsung, but it seems they also pull off shenanigans in the way of region locking. Why are these practices in place?
You can always just check that a carriers bands are supported by the hardware yourself.
This is the answer - what frequencies does the device support?
They are. All carriers use the same tower infrastructure, but I can’t use 5G from the tower operator carrier.
This is not strictly true based on how I read this comment.
Carriers may use different towers and different antennas on the same towers. This is because carriers might have different access rights to different frequency bands, and the owner of a tower could be an unrelated carrier.
I can’t speak for Canada but at least here in the US, I’ve used every Pixel on any carrier I wanted. And most of them were small ones. Straight Talk, Ting, T-Mobile, and one more I can’t even remember the name of.
IIRC, the “allowlist” stuff was just “known carriers that use towers that are compatible with this phone.” As in, different carriers use different “bands”, or frequency ranges, for their transmissions. Your phone has to have hardware support for those bands. So the “allowlist” is really just “we know these work.” I’m pretty sure neither Samsung nor Google will stop you from using an unlocked phone bought from them with any carrier that’ll accept it. These days, I just stick a SIM (or eSIM) into my phone and just go.
This seems very weird, as it shouldn’t matter at all. Are you talking about eSIM support, or just 5G?
They may be something with different wavelengths for 5G, but I’m not the right one to answer on that one.
