So some phones support a lot of 4G bands, and some phones, not as many. How do they decide which bands to support? Why not just support all of them so I don't have to factor it into my decision making when it comes to choosing a phone? What if I want to use all 3 networks?
Mobile Phones and 3G/4G Bands
DeafMutePretender on 11/11/2015 - 00:56
Comments
Plus there are different regulations and different frequencies used for emergency broadcasting and TV as well.
Not really sure why that would matter.
The phone doesn't spew out radiation on all supported bands, that'd be a massive waste of battery power! The phone hears signals from towers and responds back to the towers on the same/corresponding frequency.Countries have different frequencies reserved for different things. If you add that to the fact that the frequency used are probably what the telecommunications companies could have gotten their hands on… it's not too surprising that many countries use different frequencies.
@Oversimplified:
So you're looking more at the question of "why do countries have different bands?" than "why do phones support different bands?".@scubacoles: This is not exactly where my interest is in, so I will say what I've read from other forums I go to.
In many cases, the different band requirement is the reason why phones support different band (different modem is used in those cases, in extreme cases, i.e. the modem company (i.e. Qualcomm) refuses to sell the modem by its own (which happens a lot, actually), different SoC is used). I know that even within Snapdragon 800 SoC, there are different modems are used depending on the model number. If I give an example, LG released LG G3 Cat.6 which used Snapdragon 805. Samsung released LTE version of S4 (which also used better SoC). Samsung released Note 1 with Snapdragon S3 in Korea because the telecommunication companies refused to release one without LTE support.
Anyways, if we go past that, I think it'd probably be combination of telecommunication companies' demand + cost associated with it + what you said.
Phones that come out of China, including their international variants will have limited 4G coverage. They usually have bands supported by American, European and Asian carriers. Unfortunately a lot of the 4G bands used in Australia are not as common in those countries.
What are your "deal breaker" 4G bands? "If this phone doesn't have band x, then I ain't buyin'"
If it doesn't support 700MHz run very very far away. Plus some of the upper bands from the telco of your choice.
The Alcatel Pixi 4.5 from Optus impressively supports all the major 4G bands minus 2300MHz for only $69 plus the key 3G bands:
4G: 2100/1800/1900/2600/700 MHz
3G: 850/900/1900/2100 MHzName a Chinadroid for that price that has that support (plus local warranty)
The best way on the cheap side is to buy a prepaid from the carrier of you choice - that will work. High end phones double check what they support.
Cost and probably also a healthy dose of market segregation.
It would undoubteldy cost more to support more bands. You'd need more complicated antenna design to get good signal and the chips to support the bands would need to be more complicated.
But the real reason is more likely to be because they can make a designed for China Phone and sell it at China prices, then make a designed for Australia phone with slight tweaks to components and antenna and sell it at Australian prices.