I'm going to buy a North American Nexus 5 and use it in Europe. As far as I know, the LTE frequency bands are different in America and Europe.
My question is, would it be possible to change the radio (or modem? or whatever it's called there) to make the LTE work in Europe? Or is it hardware locked?
No, it's hardware.
Related
I am finding so much conflicting info about LTE phones... I know in the US, they support LTE 700. In Germany, Telekom uses LTE 800. What I can't find are good technical specs on any phones. Obviously a US manual is going to state LTE 700. But I can't find techniucal details on the actual chip. Maybe the freq coverage is such that the phone will support both LTE 700 and LTE 800?
Can an expert please advise me if the Skyrocket (or any other really good LTE phone) will work in Germany?
I know there is now a Europe version of this phone (GT-I9210) but I want to save $ and buy in US if possible, if the US version will work.
thanks,
Brian
No, the Skyrocket doesn't support the LTE bands used in the EU.
LTE frequencies used in Germany are 800Mhz and1800Mhz LTE bands and 2600Mhz TDD LTE band.
Thanks. Do you know of any phones that are LTE capable in both the US and Germany?
regards,
Brian
As far as I know, there is no smartphone working in the US and in Germany atm
Forgive me if this is a trivial question, but since European carriers such as Vodafone and O2 Germany also have the dual-core version of the HOX, is it possible to flash a european radio and use the European LTE frequencies? Or are the frequency bands hard-coded into the chipset?
It was my assumption that the US and European LTE variants used the same hardware components, but were just set up to use different LTE bands.
Frequency support is set in hardware.
redpoint73 said:
Frequency support is set in hardware.
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Thinking more about this, I'm still not convinced it's impossible to flash a european radio on the HOX to swap LTE bands. Unless the physical antenna is different, I'd think that it's a possibility.
With my other phone, the Samsung Skyrocket, we can flash T-Mobile radios to gain support for the 1700 AWS band. The chipset supports it, and it just took a radio flash to activate it. AFAIK, you can't use 1700 and LTE though - that or a radio with support for both doesn't exist.
I guess it depends on what chipset the German One XL uses..but I'll wait to see if someone has luck before I risk my own One X.
The hardware is different, as I already said.
The Skyrocket (and a few other AT&T phones, like the Galaxy Note) included the AWS band in hardware (likely due to the now defunct merger with T-Mobile that was going on at the time). The hardware was there, but AWS was simply not enabled in software. Hacks to make AWS work on these phones just enabled the software side for what is already supported in hardware. Without the hardware already being there, no amount of radio flashing will create support for frequencies not already there.
Its possible that some bands are "hidden" in the same way that AWS was for the Skyrocket. Lots of folks here on T-Mobile are hoping the same AWS support is possible on our phone. But if the hardware is not already there (such as for different LTE bands, as you are asking for), you can't make it happen by flashing radios. In the case of AWS, AT&T had a reason for including support (T-Mobile merger). They don't have a reason for including support for LTE bands willy-nilly, just for the sake of doing so, without any tangible (monetary) reason.
Hi there
We have a nice discussion here at my work.
We are wondering if a carrier company can modify the LTE bands of some smartphones via software (firmware update, eprom mdification or something like that).
For example, our carrier has the same frequencies for CDMA/3G and LTE as Sprint and U.S. Cellular but different LTE bands.
Our LTE band been the number 2 and SPRINT number 25 (I don't know U.S. Cellular LTE Band).
So if is possible for our carrier to get some of these second hands smartphone and with some permission from someone modify the bands or the bands is something done at SOC/Modem Level?
Hope you understand the question.
Regards
If LTE bands are dependent on the physical chips that comes with it, doesn't it means that Nexus 5 should technically supports all LTE bands regardless of which region they are sold from? I highly doubt that there's any hardware difference that ships from google US, UK, JP, AU, etc etc. They must have come from the same factory but why the differences in the LTE band supported? Will software hack be able to enable those unsupported LTE bands in the future? Any guess?
Whats the difference between?
im from dominican republic (latin america) which one should i get?
Avide said:
Whats the difference between?
im from dominican republic (latin america) which one should i get?
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Click to collapse
The US version just has some extra frequency bands for T-Mobile. They mostly operate on a different band in the US than they do in other countries. If you're not using US T-Mobile, there's really no reason to buy the US version. The Global version will work a little more reliably for you.
SkuzFoz said:
The US version just has some extra frequency bands for T-Mobile. They mostly operate on a different band in the US than they do in other countries. If you're not using US T-Mobile, there's really no reason to buy the US version. The Global version will work a little more reliably for you.
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The global version will likely work a *lot* more reliably for you if you're outside the United States. The U.S. version doesn't add extra frequencies, it trades those frequencies for other frequencies. So the U.S. version cannot work on certain frequencies that the global version can, and vice-versa. (The U.S. version cannot do HSPA on 900MHz while the global one can, and the U.S. version doesn't support networks that use 2100MHz for the downlink and 1900 for the uplink...its 2100MHz support is limited to AWS downlink.) This means that the U.S. version will, in a large percentage of countries, be limited to using EDGE networks. It really is too bad that Motorola couldn't manage to make a single model that covers all of these bands...
My impression is that there are very few carriers worldwide that operate on band 4/AWS-1. T-Mobile U.S. is probably the largest one, and even they are actually in the process of refarming their spectrum. My understanding is that they are turning down some 850MHz 2G transmitters, moving some HSPA+ over to that spectrum and some to 1900/2100 (band 1), and then re-using their AWS-1 spectrum for LTE. Once that happens, even the global version of the Moto G will work fine on T-Mobile. The global version already works on AT&T, and if you are in a metro area where T-Mobile has already completed the spectrum shuffle, the global version will work for you, too (and allow you to use your phone on HSPA networks if you ever travel outside of the country!). So for many people in the U.S., I would argue that the global version might actually make more sense, especially looking forward.
USD$0.02,
-- Nathan
the US version will only have internet with Claro bc it has hspa 850mhz while its missing 900mhz in hspa (orange internet)