According to Android police TMobile will require volte in January 2021 https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/07/23/t-mobile-will-soon-require-volte-on-all-phones-incomopatibl... this means that the Zenfone 6 won't work on tmobile anymore in just a few months, I know in the past the mods have said that volte on tmobile is not a priority but maybe it could be a priority now, or is Asus planning on having all TMobile users find a new phone?
Actually not true. After the XDA-Developers article, ASUS phones became the poster children for VoLTE issues in the USA, but my Sony Xperia XA2 Ultra (North America edition, unlocked) has the same problem. It was released in early 2018 and the only spot LTE services (VoLTE, Video Calling, WiFi Calling) appear is in one of the service menus, and they're greyed out. So I decided to visit the ASUS forums with the hope that someone like @Kris_ASUS might better explain the exact problem.
ASUS (and Sony and everybody else) knows how to write VoLTE drivers, so why is it necessary to "work with operators"? What happens if you just release your phones blindly into the market? Is there really some kind of interoperability problem...or will T-Mobile just be mad at you? 😁 Maybe I don't understand how the unlocked phone market works? Not that many years ago Verizon and Sprint both ran fully CDMA networks where every phone had to be certified, but I thought the point of having an unlocked phone is that IT WORKS EVERYWHERE. PERIOD. A user at XDA-Developers wrote last year about a VoLTE certification program at T-Mobile: which he says is ongoing. One of the options he suggests phone makers have is to "Ignore T-Mobile forbiddance and distribute devices capable of the Enhanced LTE on the T-Mobile USA network without going through the T-Mobile USA certification", which sounds good to me. The "white lists" used by AT&T (and I think Verizon), while not outright illegal, fly in the face of what people expect from an unlocked phone. And T-Mobile's certification program IMHO strays a little too close to extortion: "pay our fee or we turn your phones into paperweights". I for one am not taking this quietly and am in the process of notifying my legislators in Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, my state's Attorney General, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and probably a few members of the media, to see if they can figure out what's really going on. And I encourage US readers here to do the same, With the loss of Sprint, this country is down to three national carriers and we don't need any more anti-competitive behavior. Sorry for the rant. 😅
