So, after many months of waiting, I have some good and bad news. I got a SIM card and was finally ready to set up my Omnia for use on Verizon’s network…
Good news: Once the pins are taped off as prescribed above, the EP06-A likely works great in QMI mode out of the box in Turris Omnia 4.0 beta1. So thank you all of you here for your support.
Bad news: Wait, why did he say likely!? Well, I say likely because while you can swizzle and swirl the modem from the OS (via uqmi), the modem itself looks seriously botched – it won’t register itself on Verizon’s network. I spent probably my entire weekend learning the Hayes’ AT command language and poked and prodded at the modem 20 different ways via /dev/ttyUSB2 (playing with bands, LTE modes, forcing manual registration, improving signal strength,etc…). It just simply won’t register on Verizon’s network. I also tried popping my T-Mobile SIM in, but T-Mobile wasn’t even been seen in the operator list in respond to a COPS? command.
Now – I’m a very, very technical person, but it always could be me messing something up since this is my first time… but I really don’t think so at this point. I think the EP06-A is just a bad lemon. I noticed that while their “tech spec” document has Verizon certification pending (as denoted by the asterisk!)… Verizon still does not acknowledge the modem as of today. At the same time, however, Verizon does support older Quectel modems and a range of other manufacturer’s recent LTE-A and LTE-A Pro modems. So it’s kinda fuel to the fire for me. I e-mailed Quectel support with some diagnosis I did, so we’ll see.
Anyways, I’m really not optimistic that this modem will work on the Verizon network, so I broke open the piggy bank and ordered a Telit LM-940 (mPCI-e) card. It’s a LTE-A Pro Cat11 modem that Verizon has already certified. Supposedly only requires >= kernel 4.10, and Turris Omnia 4.0 beta1 is based on 4.14. We’ll find out this weekend. I can open a new thread for the LM-940 if desired.