r/CapeCellular

This is the official subreddit for Cape, America's Privacy-First Mobile Carrier. Join us in the movement for mobile security.

Since my a lot has changed...

Our subscriber base is 3x larger.
As you can see we really hit an inflection point in late April and have been growing at a faster rate since then.

Our download speeds are 2-3x faster.
As of early July I think we finally put the slow download speed complaints to bed. We’ve made big investments in network infrastructure and countless optimizations across our network stack. In the end, it was some optimizations to our GTP proxy that made the biggest impact. If you tried us in the past and left because download speeds were too slow, I would encourage you to give us another shot.

Our coverage is now inclusive of 2 of the 3 largest US networks.
As of late June, customers can now connect to Cape via towers operated by 2 of the 3 largest from a single eSIM. We’re not contractually allowed to name them, so we will refer to them as Cape Alpha and Cape Tango. In a few days with the next update to the Cape app, you will be able to see which network you are connected to and change your preferred network. If you’re in an area without good service, you can go into the Cape app and change this setting to try the other network.

Our network now supports RCS and WiFi calling.
RCS and WiFi calling now work on iOS and GrapheneOS. Support for RCS and WiFi calling on more devices is coming this fall (more on this below). On iOS, Identifier Rotation will not work with RCS and WiFi Calling (every time your identifier changes it will turn off RCS/WiFi Calling). We are working towards the long-term solution, hopefully it lands in the next 3-6 months, but it is not something we can solve on our own.

Our minimal data retention claims were audited by a third-party.
This has been a frequent request from people on Reddit, so we picked one of the most important claims we make that relies on trust and . This is in addition to the work we’ve done on for services covering both consumer and enterprise. We will continue to do more work in this direction that dials up transparency and helps build trust that we are doing what we say we’re doing.

And that’s just my top 5. There were countless other improvements we’ve shipped since March that all contribute to Cape running smoother and working more reliably for our customers.

But we’re not done! 

Here’s a few of the big things we have planned for the rest of the year:

Spam Filtering
Most other carriers use vendor software that is powered by people in countries around the world reading your messages to identify spam. We built our own solution that involves no humans in the loop so your spam is filtered without anyone needing to read your messages. This should start rolling out in the coming weeks.

RCS + Identifier Rotation on Samsung devices
With the release of One UI 9, Cape will finally be supported in a first class way on Samsung devices. In our early testing, all the quirks around APN’s and carrier configs not getting set right go away, and both RCS and Identifier Rotation work seamlessly.

RCS + WiFi Calling on Pixels
With the September QPR update we should be able to switch to the Cape PLMN on Pixels, unblocking RCS and WiFi Calling.

Secondary Numbers
We have been working all summer at redesigning the messaging experience to be more on par with other messaging apps, as well as adding voice + voicemail support. In the next few months this will graduate from an “Experimental Feature” into a real, fully featured secure communications channel.

Number Flexibility
Along with the improvements to Secondary Numbers, we want to give everyone the ability to port-in secondary numbers and swap between primary/secondary.

This unlocks a lot of interesting use cases. One I’m particularly excited about is the ability to sign up for Cape with a new number, but then port-in your old number as a secondary number. This lets you start fresh with a new Cape number on your SIM card and port your existing number in as a secondary number. This gives you all the privacy benefits of getting a new number without any of the tradeoffs of missing important messages or calls to your old number.

Unified Push
Notifications (and Network Lock) on Graphene currently require you to install sandboxed Google Play Services. We know customers on Graphene want to de-Google their phones, so we are going to add support for the Unified Push protocol at some point this fall.

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These are some of the big things I can talk about now, but you can expect a continued stream of smaller improvements (yes we’re working on and ). We’re also starting on some bigger long-term investments we’re making for next year that I can’t talk about yet.

We’re very active on Reddit and I personally read everything you all post, so keep the feedback coming. None of this is possible without a community of believers. We’re grateful for all of you that signed up early while we’re working through the remaining rough edges, and we're excited to be on this ride together as we rethink what it means to be a carrier that puts consumer privacy first.