What's the market for tri-band phones?

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Bert Hyman - 08 Sep 2008 19:44 GMT

There seems to be a lot more tri-band phones on the market in the US
than quad-band.

Is 900MHz no longer in much use in the 900/1800 regions?

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Bert Hyman | St. Paul, MN | bert@iphouse.com

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DevilsPGD - 08 Sep 2008 23:47 GMT

>There seems to be a lot more tri-band phones on the market in the US
>than quad-band.
>
>Is 900MHz no longer in much use in the 900/1800 regions?

I suspect that phone manufacturers just figured out that the vast
majority of Americans simply don't travel internationally, so anything
beyond local frequencies isn't useful.

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Bert Hyman - 08 Sep 2008 23:53 GMT

In news:vt6bc4l2p11jj666v3s786l0nh9ujo0ubf@4ax.com DevilsPGD
<spam_narf_spam@crazyhat.net> wrote:

>>There seems to be a lot more tri-band phones on the market in the US
>>than quad-band.
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
> majority of Americans simply don't travel internationally, so anything
> beyond local frequencies isn't useful.

I thought that's what all the dual-band phones were for.

So, if they bother to sell a phone in the US with more than 850/1900, it
has to be for international travel, so why would they leave off 900MHz?

I use T-Mobile here in the US and gather that they have (almost?) no
native 850MHz service, but that they have roaming agreements with some
850MHz carriers out in the boondocks.

Is it the same way with 900MHz in the rest of the world? A withering
legacy service?

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Bert Hyman St. Paul, MN bert@iphouse.com

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Polly the Parrot - 09 Sep 2008 00:32 GMT

> Is it the same way with 900MHz in the rest of the world? A withering
> legacy service?

Not on 2G services.

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SMS - 09 Sep 2008 01:44 GMT

> So, if they bother to sell a phone in the US with more than 850/1900, it
> has to be for international travel, so why would they leave off 900MHz?

Those phones use very old chipsets, designed back when the only GSM
service in the U.S. was at 1900 MHz. They can do 1800 _and_ 1900, but
only 800 _or_ 900. So for non-North America they do 900/1800/1900 and
the phone is fairly worthless in the U.S.. For North America they do
800/1800/1900 and the phone is fairly worthless in Europe and Asia.

Just because it's a recent phone doesn't mean it's using one of the
latest chipsets.

> Is it the same way with 900MHz in the rest of the world? A withering
> legacy service?

No. 900 MHz is by far the most popular frequency in the ROW.

Bottom line is that the tri-band phones are pretty worthless. Get either
a dual band and save money, or a quad-band if you want a phone that's
usable throughout the GSM world.

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Kevin K - 09 Sep 2008 01:44 GMT

> There seems to be a lot more tri-band phones on the market in the US
> than quad-band.
>
> Is 900MHz no longer in much use in the 900/1800 regions?

I just checked a selection of the lower end models at att.com, and the
phones I looked at were either quad band, or dual band. I didn't see
any that dropped the foreign 900 band but had 1800.

If there are phones missing the 900, it may be that they provide the
1800 to allow occasional roaming.

What used to be fairly common were tri band phones (for tmobile for
instance, or for foreign companies) that had 1900 but not 850. This
allowed roaming in the US, but was far from ideal for people with ATT
since ATT has a lot of 850 coverage areas.

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B. Wright - 09 Sep 2008 05:12 GMT

> There seems to be a lot more tri-band phones on the market in the US
> than quad-band.
>
> Is 900MHz no longer in much use in the 900/1800 regions?

To add to what the others have said re: Euro centric (missing
850) tri-band and US centric (missing 900), there seem to be some "quad
band" phones now which are still useless for global voice roaming. They
count one of the typically UMTS only frequencies (2100 etc..) as the
fourth band, which, probably doesn't end up being too useful for voice I
imagine (voice can go over 3G/2100 as well I guess, but the coverage
probably sucks).

I imagine data coverage is questionable (both cost and
functionality wise) on foreign carriers while roaming. The only
sensbile phone if you want to make sure you can make voice calls is the
850/900/1800/1900 GSM+GPRS/EDGE if you need data. If you wanted a phone
with all the "normal" and 3G frequencies now, what would it be? At
least five or six 700(ish?)/850/900/1700/1800/1900/2100.

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