I am trying to set up a plan with a smaller carrier, but I have a feeling that since they are not on Google’s allowlist (even though I live in Canada), they will not let me use 5G with them. The Pixel watch supported carrier list also makes no sense, because for some reason the new carriers for the watch 2 don’t support the first version? I was thinking about switching to Samsung, but it seems they also pull off shenanigans in the way of region locking. Why are these practices in place?
They are. All carriers use the same tower infrastructure, but I can’t use 5G from the tower operator carrier.
This is not strictly true based on how I read this comment.
Carriers may use different towers and different antennas on the same towers. This is because carriers might have different access rights to different frequency bands, and the owner of a tower could be an unrelated carrier.