I’ll just be happy if they have basic things like VoIP and emergency call handling properly defined.
Australia shut down our 2G and 3G networks, and it’s been an absolute dumpster fire.
A bunch of early 4G phones drop back to 3G for voice calls, but that’s really easy to check for and that’s mostly old phones anyway.
The real dumpster fire was emergency calls. It turns out there’s phones in the wild with fully functional VoLTE but internal logic that forces them to drop back to 3G or 2G specifically for emergency calls.
Other phones can make emergency calls, but only on certain networks - a phone will try any available network regardless of SIM card when making emergency calls.
Or a phone can make emergency calls on any network - but only if it’s running the correct modem firmware version.
Or it’ll work on any network if it has a Telstra SIM card, but if it has an Optus card it can’t make an emergency call on Telstra because it isn’t running the Telstra-specific VoLTE code anymore.
The best part is that this emergency call functionality depends on you specifically dialling the emergency number, so there’s no way to test any device other than actually dialling an emergency.
You can place test calls, but emergency calls are magically handled differently and the only way to trigger that is to make an emergency call.
Carriers can test phones in their labs, but they have no way to know what modem firmware end users are running. The same hardware sold in different places can have different software images loaded.
I’ll just be happy if they have basic things like VoIP and emergency call handling properly defined.
Australia shut down our 2G and 3G networks, and it’s been an absolute dumpster fire.
A bunch of early 4G phones drop back to 3G for voice calls, but that’s really easy to check for and that’s mostly old phones anyway.
The real dumpster fire was emergency calls. It turns out there’s phones in the wild with fully functional VoLTE but internal logic that forces them to drop back to 3G or 2G specifically for emergency calls.
Other phones can make emergency calls, but only on certain networks - a phone will try any available network regardless of SIM card when making emergency calls.
Or a phone can make emergency calls on any network - but only if it’s running the correct modem firmware version.
Or it’ll work on any network if it has a Telstra SIM card, but if it has an Optus card it can’t make an emergency call on Telstra because it isn’t running the Telstra-specific VoLTE code anymore.
The best part is that this emergency call functionality depends on you specifically dialling the emergency number, so there’s no way to test any device other than actually dialling an emergency.
Gotta love the non testable features.
“Can we place a test call?”
“Why would you want to do THAT?”
You can place test calls, but emergency calls are magically handled differently and the only way to trigger that is to make an emergency call.
Carriers can test phones in their labs, but they have no way to know what modem firmware end users are running. The same hardware sold in different places can have different software images loaded.