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Ironically modules made by Quectel are GPL compliant (https://www.quectel.com/quectel-open-source) and you can build custom firmwares for them (https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk) to strip out any OTA logic.

Fibocom, on the other hand, not so much.

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Oh interesting! I’m curious how they deal with FCC compliance. I’ve worked with espressif chips, and the way they stay compliant is to insert binary blobs in the final binary so that you can’t access the radio except through their API. Without this you’d have to get FCC certification yourself, possibly with each update.

The basebands underneath still use firmware blobs like modern wifi cards. Not ideal from a Free software perspective, but better than being left vulnerable to things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30301240

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