Who Controls Carrier Compatibility?

Qualcomm for at least a few years has made one chip that works with all mobile networks.

So why is it that there are phones that still do not support all US carriers.

This is a android sub but one example was the Lumia 950s had no Verizon support even though the chips they used were capable of it.

Another more relevant example is any chinese phone..Xiaomi, Huawei, etc and OnePlus especially all seem to leave out any CDMA support and at least band 13 LTE support. I get that they are GSM phones, but there are no GSM only chips anymore...so someone is intentionally not enabling CDMA and LTE support for some networks. Why though?

 

So the question here is are these manufacturers specifically excluding CDMA networks and some LTE or is this how they get the chips from qualcomm and they have no control over the networks the chips they get supports?

I'm not talking about getting certification for CDMA either..which I understand why they would be reluctant to do..but why can't they just turn on all of the network support and let the community figure out how to get it to work.

Maybe the logical explanation is that they can't.

TL;DR

Is it qualcomm that controls what networks their chips work on via firmware or do the phone manufacturers decide?

Submitted October 31, 2017 at 03:30PM by loki993 http://ift.tt/2A3oNKP http://ift.tt/eA8V8J