Google Pixel 2 not compatible with China Telecom, one of world's largest carriers

It’s a well known fact that Google isn’t officially selling its Pixel series of smartphones in China. But that doesn’t mean people in China can’t purchase them, right? In fact, a large number of people have been using both first and second gen Pixels in the Asian country. However, now it has come to light that a section of these users aren’t happy with their units, and Google in general (for not listening to their complaints).

The section of users we’re taking about here consists of those that are subscribers of China Telecom, a state-run Chinese carrier which is not only one of the biggest telecom company in China but on the global level as well.

We’ve come across multiple threads on official Pixel Community forum where Chinese users are complaining that their Pixel 2 units aren’t compatible with their carrier. Specifically, most of the complainants are reporting issues with accessing LTE on their Pixel devices, but several others say their units have problem with calls and SMS as well.

Here’s what an affected Chinese user said (translated):

Pixel 2 xl can not solve the Chinese telecom calls and 4G support, ah, I used from nexus one 5x, but the pixel series has not been used, if you can not solve, I can only use other brands of mobile phones, thank you.

Going by user comments on both Google’s official forum as well as some Chinese forums, it seems like support is there on both hardware level as well as firmware level, just that some software tweaks need to be done. For example, some users says tweaking the carrier_policy.xml file (present in the EFS partition) does the trick for both Pixel and Pixel 2, but the changes get overridden after every update.

A quick look at Pixel 2’s network support details reveals it supports almost all LTE bands required to work on China Telecom’s network. So it’s unclear where exactly (and most importantly why) the problem is present.

We also found some complaints related to this matter on Twitter.

Officially, Google hasn’t said much on this issue, except suggesting an affected user on Twitter to contact their service provider.

But the aforementioned tweet, as you can see, was made back in February this year, as it was in response to a query from a first-gen Pixel user. More recently, we found a bug related to the matter has been submitted on Google’s issue tracking website. Late last month, the company updated that thread by saying:

Thank you for reporting this issue. We have shared this with our product and engineering team and will update this issue with more information as it becomes available.

But there has been no update since then.

It’s difficult to say if the problem is solely at Google’s end, or China Telecom has something to do with it as well. Anyway, what is sad is that customers are at the receiving end, for they have paid a premium for their device, only to realize the phone doesn’t work properly with their carrier. Let’s hope this coverage of ours brings the problem to the notice of the concerned company, and they resolve it sooner than later.

Pixel User Community 1 2 3 | V2EX (Chinese) | Google Issue Tracker

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