OnePlus 10 Pro’s 5G Situation in the US is Not Ideal

Stop! Before you fire off that pre-order for the newly launched OnePlus 10 Pro, you need to know a little bit about its 5G situation. Depending on the carrier you planned to run it on, your 5G experience may differ vastly from the guy running it on another carrier.

While the OnePlus 10 Pro is running Qualcomm’s latest 5G setup and should technically work on all major US carriers without hiccup, that won’t actually be the case. If you run it on T-Mobile, you should get the best experience out of the box. And that makes sense since T-Mobile happens to be selling the phone. However, if on Verizon, things are apparently a work-in-progress. For AT&T, well, it’s a bit of a mess.

According to CNET, who confirmed the following details with OnePlus, here’s what we’re looking at:

• T-Mobile: The OnePlus 10 Pro will work on low-band and mid-band 5G with T-Mobile, and that’s cool since mid-band is where T-Mobile shines. You should see both good coverage and super fast speeds running the 10 Pro there.
• Verizon: OnePlus is apparently still working to certify the 10 Pro with Verizon to work on their low and mid-band 5G. OnePlus often runs into this situation through Verizon, where we aren’t sure if full support will arrive by launch time (April 14), but they typically get there close to when they need to. The OnePlus 10 Pro does not support 5G mmW in the US, so you won’t get the 2Gbps theoretical speeds from Verizon, ever.
• AT&T: Umm, there is no 5G support on the OnePlus 10 Pro with AT&T. Again, the phone completely supports everything on paper, but OnePlus doesn’t want to get the phone certified with AT&T 5G. So that means only up to a 4G LTE signal if you take this $900 phone to AT&T. Big yikes there.

To recap, OnePlus’ new phone has limped onto US soil lacking 5G support on one of the three major US carriers because OnePlus doesn’t want to get it certified. Huh.