We are looking for a way to connect our Particle Borons to the Verizon network for more remote areas. We got a couple of Hologram sims to get this working after reading some post on how to do so (in 2019), only to find out later that it now longer works in 2020. (see links to issue posts below)
One post says it need to be certified by IMEI, who does this certification, Particle, or Hologram? If by Particle, when will testing be done what are the plans to do so and get it on the Verizon network to accept connections?
The process here no longer works we can connect to AT&T but not Verizon - Boron LTE- support
So according to Hologram, it is up to particle to get the Boron certified to be on it’s network. Is this happening or planned? The electron is on the list.
The certification and registering of IMEIs needs to be done by Particle. It will likely be done at some point in the future for Verizon, but probably not in 2020, and not necessarily for all existing SKUs.
You can connect by AT&T because we did go through the certification process for AT&T because that’s what the Boron LTE normally uses with the built-in Particle SIM.
Thanks for the update. If you can please bump up on the priority list. We currently have huge limitations with the Boron only being able to connect to AT&T. At least the Electron was able to also connect to TMobile, but Verizon is really the only one covers remote areas at all.
We ran into the same issue and had to redesign our boards to work with Pycom instead because I was told by Particle last year that they would not do the Verizon certification. They initially even expressed disbelief that I couldn’t get AT&T coverage. Talked to ublox as well and it seems to just be a matter of submitting IMEIs. At one point Verizon certification was even free, they just had to go through the process.
I would not recommend going to Pycom however. Their products look good on the surface but are not well thought out, missing a ton of basic features that you would need to do anything more than a basic example. Their documentation and support are some of the worst I’ve ever seen from any company. Their own code examples often fail to work or cause exceptions. They also have horrible stability issues that have caused us hundreds of lost man hours and data issues due to core panicks, modem firmware, and pycom firmware issues. The kicker is that their boards barely even work on Verizon either and seem to require different settings to connect based on what tower you are connecting to (same boards/sims that work in one location need to have the cid and other settings changed in order to connect after simply moving them a few miles away).
We were told by ublox to look into Verizon certification ourselves. But guess how that is coming along due to covid? We are pretty close to shuttering our business over this. We have lost a few clients and at this point have no solution.
It’s difficult at this point because we have older Borons running happily on Verizon for over a year now with no issue. The only problems we had initially with them were when using hologram sims and getting fplmn blacklisted. Switching to nimbelink on those devices worked great, but that doesn’t work on newer ones thanks to the IMEI issue here.
We are in the same situation in southwest Kansas. We had good AT&T coverage last year but then started to loose service(re-purposing towers?). It has been a battle for 9 months now to relocate devices, external antennas and everything we could think of to get a signal. Rural it not on a HOT list for AT&T so now we have huge dead zones. Verizon seems to have superior signal but we cannot use out Borons because of certification. Desperately need a solution.