Why does your Mobile phone never work as well in the US :(
Ever wondered why your European GSM Phone doesn't seem to work that well in the US? I was chatting with a US colleague about this just the other day.
Well in the US the GSM Network is made up of 850MHz and 1900 MHz bands. Between the 850 and 1900, the US gets covered completely.
In the rest of the world we use predominately the 900MHz band although many service providers also use 1800MHz.
So why do you get such bad coverage in certain areas? Well some places are great for 850 but horrible for 1900 and on the flipside some places have excellent 1900 and are just bad for 850.
To make matters even more confusing T-Mobile just got the 1700 band from the government so this will make things even more confusing in the next 2 to 3 years.
The best plan to avoid any problems is to carry a Quad Band Phone - a phone that supports 850,900, 1800 and 1900 MHz
The HTC Touch Cruise, TyTn II, Blackjack 1 and 2 are all Quad Band phones.....
The other variation of phone is a tri-band phone (surprisingly a phone that supports 3 bands) - there are normally two combinations of tri-band phones:
900/1800/1900 - Excellent internationally and very good in the US
850/1800/1900 - Excellent in the US but not very good internationally
You can get more details HERE
Comments
Anonymous
January 13, 2008
The comment has been removedAnonymous
January 13, 2008
Well, to complicate even more, if you're travelling to Korea/Japan then you'll only have network if your phone supports 3G!! Joe - you may need to make sure your SIM card is 3G capable and that 3G's enable on your account. 3G doesn't seem to be enabled by default on Vodafone.Anonymous
January 15, 2008
I brought my TyTn to Italy and used a TIM SIM card and had better reception and service than I do in the US with AT&T where I experience random dropped calls. In some cases I would change back my Cingular SIM card to check voicemail and was surprised to see I'd get even better 3G coverage when roaming over Wind.