Fairphone 5 - Getting 5G SA running

Discuss The Products
1

Hi there,

it is now almost a year that the Fairphone 5 is on the market (but I’m too impatient to wait another week).

TLDR: Whom to annoy to get 5G SA finally available?

Short introduction: I want to use 5G SA/ stand-alone since I use my smartphone as a modem and often get high pings when the cell near me is quite crowded, which should improve then.

Since the launch of the Fairphone 5, the support page mentions that 5G SA is only supported by Vodafone Germany and there are ‘… more to come!’

After more than half a year, I got impatient and asked the support. This was their answer on May 8:

After checking with my colleagues, 5G SA is not enabled on the Fairphone 5 by default. For 5G SA to work on the Fairphone 5, it has to be approved by the network operator specifically for the Fairphone 5. At the moment, only Vodafone supports this. It’s likely that O2 will follow in the future, but that’s ultimately dependent on their decision.

Fine. So it seems to be an issue with my provider, let’s mail them. They just answered that the Fairphone is currently not compatible and sent me a link to their community forum. They have a page listing all officially compatible phones and even the ones just tested by the community.
So it seems there are phones not officially approved by the provider. When I asked in the community forum, I got as an answer that Fairphone needs to implement the settings o2 Germany provides to the GSMA database.

So clearly one of the two sides is wrong. Does anybody know which one?

2

Da es ja um O2 DE geht, könntest du dich ans andere Topic anhängen?

3

Hatte ich erst überlegt, aber da hört es ja leider auch bei der Aussage vom Support auf. Daher dachte ich, ich probiere es hier mal etwas allgemeiner, da es ja augenscheinlich jeden europäischen Provider abgesehen von Vodafone Germany betrifft.

4

Well then back to EN :wink: did you already confront FP with O2s answer?

5

Yes, I did, forgot about adding that.

Dear XXX,

as far as I understood after reaching out to o2, the information should be available in the GSMA Network Settings Exchange database. Does Fairphone uses this source?

With this data embedded we should be able to access the 5G SA network. If the firmware is up-to-date, I will have to reach out to o2 again.

Kind regards

Max

Thank you for your reply. I’d have to check this with my colleagues. From what I understand is that O2 hasn’t approved 5G SA for the Fairphone 5 yet. To our knowledge, only Vodafone has done this, and so only 5G SA is only currently available on Vodafone networks in combination with the Fairphone 5.

[a couple of days later]

I’m emailing you with an update.

Similar to VoLTE/Wi-Fi Calling, 5G SA is not enabled on the Fairphone 5 by default. We’ll need to work together with partners to activate this. We unfortunately don’t have access to decisions around partnerships.

At the moment, 5G SA is not available (yet) for O2 customers. We frequently update our support articles with the most accurate information, I advise you to check these for for updates.

This was the final mail. Two things left me wondering:

If o2 has to approve every smartphone for 5G SA, how is it possible that there are phones without approval that can use 5G SA?

There are about a hundred mobile network operators just in the EU. If Fairphone would have to work with every of them to get 5G SA running, imagine the work of a company like Samsung selling more than a dozen of phones globally. Currently, there are about 250 smartphone manufacturers worldwide. This seems exactly what the GSMA database is for.

So I’m tending to contact Fairphone again instead of o2, but was wondering if anybody knows more about the technical aspects of this topic.