I use such a service for home internet in Ottawa, Canada (https://ncf.ca) and it’s been working great - with much better customer service.
The stopper for Bell Fiber FTTH is Bell blocking resale of service on their pure fiber lines to 3rd parties. I don't remember any specific dates but the CRTC is bound to hopefully force their hand one day.
I am too hoping they one day offer it, I love NCF.
Given that it's (probably?) impossible to use cellular internet without handing over your ID to at least one entity, the target audience of this plan is probably one that would prefer that entity to be one for which privacy is a primary concern.
(This is why I always wished Apple would become a cellular provider.)
Nevertheless, once you start spending 8 hours/day in the same spot for days on end, it will be pretty easy to link you from tower records to traffic, and then to your real world identity.
Assumedly, this number will not work for that...
EDIT:Bi previously said that the irs required you to have a phone in your name. That was incorrect. I meant to refer to the full secure online access: You can verify by phone or mail, and they disabled mail option during covid a while ago.
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/secure-access-how-to-registe...
The IRS most certainly does not require a cell phone registered in your name, nor could they.
When I opened the account in person, I needed a photo ID (driver license) and social security card (proof of SSN). Online, I surprisingly did not need the driver license at all, just had to provide SSN and e-sign a thousand forms. Phone number was not required and was not checked beyond confirming it was mine with a text code.
That has not been my experience with the IRS and my banks.
Last time I manually filled taxes this wasn't something I had to do.
I pay 18.80 GBP a month for this.
> A phone number registered & operated under Purism
> Help fund additional developmental services offered from Purism
?
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that everyone wants this, but I think it (including “privacy as a service” as part of point №1) is ⅔ of the value proposition.
99 USD in Canada will buy you 50GB of data and unlimited calls to Canadian numbers only. Why are you judging a US phone plan based on how it compares to UK plans?
I'm not suggesting that $99 isn't too much, just that to expect price parity when the average subscribers per square mile is vastly different isn't realistic.
EDIT: rereading it, it looks like the extra cost is giving you some privacy benefits and helping fund them.
(It was in a country of >1billion people)
Having your phone radio on at all (even without a SIM, e.g. E911 calls) is inherently privacy violating. If you must have connectivity on the go, any prepaid SIM + always on VPN will do the trick. Use Twilio if you want multiple numbers.
$99/mo is ludicrous, even if this actually works, which I have doubts about given the history of purism.
It just feels like they're taking advantage of people.
Although now that I think about it I wonder how they do E911? Sounds like a liability
Perhaps a writable (auto-updating?) sim card could make this process easier and faster.
Also they have their Librem One offering that includes a VPN. So it very much fits that use case. It's just not included.
Presumably they have the information and will respond to a warrant but won't tell the carrier they're MVNO'ing who you are. This isn't that weird; for "work phones" companies often get a pool of SIMs registered to them which they then pass out to employees, and AT&T or whoever doesn't need to know who's in possession of each one at every moment.
Not sure what you mean exactly, I'm talking about the service, not the basic existence of dual-SIM functionality (something I already have).
But it hurts that Purism uses their monopoly over their niche to upcharge customers so much.
edit: I'm wrong. Didn't know about their financial woes.
Monopoly? Purism barely exists as a company.
This is just another desperate attempt to get some cash flow, I don't think they've even managed to ship the gen1 phone to all the backers yet.
This is not a desperate attempt, it is another service offering to align with their privacy focused hardware and software products.
They have been very open and honest about any delays in the shipping of the phones. Evergreen batches are nearly a month away. So they haven’t “managed” that yet because the process has not completed yet.
I signed on for their LibremOne family plan, and gave them 18 months to pull it together. They were unable to keep a Matrix homeserver operating correctly. I gave up.
I discovered privacytools.io operating services, and recently debian.social. And bought a PinePhone.
Perhaps you object more to the $840 than the $360? Did you see the price of the phone?
Edit: s/phone/dialtone/
It might be the personalized pricing you get, just because they know your zipcode.
basically, I don't buy the significant value in their privacy mode (perhaps it has value to others, but not so much to me). I can see the value in supporting the development of the phone, but its a very significant delta in cost.
The sms and voice limits are high enough not to matter.
"limited to United States"
I hate it when marketers say one thing, but the contract says the exact opposite.
Or that only in San Marino (judging by the .sm domain)?
What does this mean, exactly? At what point does "compression" kick in, and what does "compression" entail?
No clear definition of where deprioritization limits kick in or how it is to be enforced. Who cares though! The Librem 5 ships with a cat3 LTE modem. That is only just LTE on a single carrier, no LTE Advanced, no carrier aggregation. Forget talking about 5G, we don't even have a modem that supports full 4G operating speeds. Stop hyping something you aren't close to.
Now I get it, I'm sounding very harsh but understand that this is a company that's selling a packaged virtue signal (sorta like Virtu used to) and is consistently over-promising and under-delivering. Making phones is hard, making them in the US is next to impossible. I'd rather have a piece of working/shipping Chinesium (Pinephone) for a fifth of the price and use a sim card paid in cash from a prepaid carrier that I can load whatever to it and isn't going to be gone in a year, if I cared to attempt anonymity.
I'm not sure this instinct applies much to this situation, but it immediately came to mind. Vertical integration is where user privacy (from service providers) starts to erode.
Ideally, we should have competing but inter-operable service providers on common platforms and protocols which have nothing to do with the service providers.
