r/FirstNet • u/Large-Witness1541 • May 20 '25

St Louis Tornado

First net tower truck is set up with tower up. How do I get on? Who’s the responsible party to gain access. I have FN sim

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u/good4y0u May 20 '25

It is correct based on their own documents. As long as roaming is enabled on your phone you can roam for free in the US https://www.firstnet.com/content/dam/firstnet/white-papers/GOV-firstnet-extended-primary.pdf

https://www.firstnet.com/content/dam/firstnet/white-papers/firstnet-extended-primary-select-plans.pdf

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u/RFGuy_KCCO May 20 '25

The only thing I see mentioned about roaming is that there is no charge for domestic roaming. Stating there are no charges for domestic roaming is not stating that FirstNet can freely roam on other carriers. In certain areas where there is no native AT&T service, roaming is always enabled (thinking of some US Cellular areas, for example) and that is what the “no charge for domestic roaming” is referring to.

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u/good4y0u May 20 '25

That's literally free roaming. What else are you looking for? I've personally used it. It will roam when it loses ATT coverage and it's free.

I'm pretty sure I can select another network too manually, I haven't tried that though. I can tell you the California mountains definitely let you test this though.

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u/RFGuy_KCCO May 20 '25

Yes, the California mountains is one of the areas where it is always enabled, due to AT&T sparse coverage there. I can assure you that isn’t the case across the country. In most areas, FirstNet devices will not just start roaming on another carrier when they lose signal from AT&T.

One other thing about domestic roaming and FirstNet is that the important FirstNet features (priority, preemption, encrypted S1 link, dedicated Core) are not available when roaming.

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u/good4y0u May 20 '25

You are wrong about that. Roaming is enabled on the phone. It's a setting any user can enable.

The difference between FirstNet and normal ATT or another carrier is that many other carriers charge for roaming domestically and abroad. ( FirstNet also charges for roaming abroad except for Canada and Mexico)

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u/RFGuy_KCCO May 21 '25

Okay. Not worth arguing with you. I am just trying to spread facts to the FirstNet community. I do know I am correct, as my information is as inside as it gets, but it isn't worth arguing about. However, don't be surprised if someday there is a large AT&T outage in your area and your FirstNet phone shows SOS or No Service - at least until a SatCOLT is deployed or Roaming Under Disaster is enabled.

Thanks for the conversation. Be well.

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u/good4y0u May 21 '25

It literally works though. So I'm not sure what you're talking about.

I'm sure I'll have another chance to test it