I, Mother Mychaela, consider all cellular technologies newer than GSM/2G
to be morally wrong — it is my personal opinion, and I do
not feel any need to justify it.
However, I am not principally opposed to supporting those newer
technologies — but I do impose one very major but
.
The special quirk which I require as a condition before embarking on any
project to support any newer-than-2G technologies is inverted order of
preference (IOP):
Any phone or modem that supports 3G (UMTS) must also support 2G (no 3G-only phones), and any phone or modem that supports 4G (LTE) must also support 2G and 3G (no LTE-only phones).
I (Mother Mychaela) would be very interested in developing a solution for UMTS/3G that would work together with our existing FreeCalypso 2G solution to produce a 2G+3G phone or modem, but I am not willing to skip UMTS/3G and jump directly to LTE.
Adding support for VoLTE (specially VoLTE rather than LTE as in mobile Internet) is something that I would be interested in after we have support for UMTS/3G (if we ever do), but not before.
Any phone or modem that supports multiple technology generations must allow the end user to set her own order of preference for network search. I personally desire a phone that will always look for GSM/2G networks first, then look for UMTS/3G networks only if it can't find any GSM/2G, and go into LTE (or more properly VoLTE) mode only as a last resort when neither GSM/2G nor UMTS/3G is available. I would also strongly prefer this last-resort-LTE mode to be strictly limited to VoLTE only, without any support for LTE as in mobile Internet.