GSM Phones North America

American 2G Cooperative is a start-up non-profit cellular phone company in USA, and I (Mychaela N. Falconia) am one of its founders, currently serving as President & CTO. We seek to build a new GSM cellular network in our great country, a specialty network specifically designed to serve the needs of Vintage Mobile Phone users who reside here. The network we seek to build shall consist of the following components:

1. Physical GSM services in those small select locations where we can obtain the necessary spectrum. There are a few select locations with PCS1900 spectrum vacancies, and there is a much larger set of locations (albeit still rural and remote) with available GSM850 spectrum.
2. Roaming-capable core network. At the present time the very unloved GSM/2G network of T-Mobile USA is still up in many places, but they artificially block access to it for their own native users and for users of TMO-parented MVNOs. Yet users of SIM cards issued by foreign operators (e.g., Mexican Telcel) who roam on TMO experience much higher quality of service, without any artificial blocking! When A2GC becomes a physical GSM operator in some little remote corner of rural America, operating under a license from FCC, we'll be able to use FCC rules section 20.12(d) to compel TMO into letting us roam on their network, with the same level of roaming service which they provide to foreign SIM cards.

A lot of information about A2GC and progress of our work toward the goals listed above has previously been posted in /r/vintagemobilephones community on Reddit. However, our team's ability to post in that forum has recently been disrupted by hostile actions on the part of Reddit site-wide admins, necessitating the present refugee-mode migration to Lemmy. Just to be clear, VMP community on Reddit loved our content, it always got significant upvotes, and we can only assume that VMP mod team welcomed our contributions as well - but Reddit site-wide admins got in the way and thereby made life worse for all GSM/2G users in North America, blocking communication between the new 2G-serving cellular phone company and its base of would-be service subscribers.

Over the coming weeks and months we are going to post more content here, eventually recreating the full repository of knowledge that once resided in VMP community on Reddit. However, let me close this post with some important legal and contact information.

A2GC is a non-profit corporation seeking federal tax-exempt status under Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(12) as a mutual or cooperative telephone company (please note it is a different type of tax-exempt non-profit entity from the usual 501(c)(3) - see IRS publication 557), and like all tax-exempt non-profit entities, we are required to publicly disclose our management structure, bylaws, financial details and so forth. While our website is still under construction, the key basics are as follows:

We are a Delaware corporation, our incorporation file number with the state of DE is 10180871, and our federal EIN is 33-4896531. Our physical office address is 16870 West Bernardo Drive, Suite 400, San Diego, CA 92127 - however, because we don't employ any full-time staff, only part-time volunteers, in-person meetings at our office location are available only by appointment. Contact details for our current corporate officers are as follows:

Ms. Mychaela Falconia, President & CTO: falconia@usa2g.org
Ms. Jessica Westerman, Secretary: secretary@usa2g.org
Ms. Shannon Hogan, Treasurer: treasurer@usa2g.org

We sincerely apologize to our users-in-waiting for having to take this detour, i.e., for having to take a break from our actual work of building our new GSM cellular network and spend time and energy on Reddit-to-Lemmy migration instead - but those Reddit site-wide admins forced our hand by blocking our ability to post in the original community. Please stay tuned for more technical and network-operational content that will be posted here shortly.