Does the FP3 work in Japan?

Ah, so I read this and I need to make sure the FF3 can support MFBI. So I guess I need to check that first. If it can i’m confident the reception will be good enough as i’ve checked the coverage areas and Japan is pretty well covered even in rural areas.

Sorry its only in Japanese but you can use google translate for the general gist (like I did).

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@BertG mentioned MFBI above in this post. I would expect it to work with our smartphones (FP3), as the post is from 2014, but I am not sure the same is true for FP2

EDIT: If you look at my first post which lists the frequencies (as mentioned by Fairphone themselves) you can see overlaps with the same frequencies used by different technologies (2G, 3G, and 4G/LTE). I would not expect the smartphone has the same antennas for different technologies (often, the same antennas even speak say WLAN and Bluetooth). This suggests the protocols will be understood as long as the frequency is correct.

Now, the frequency is a range, and the different band (B18/B19) are sitting in approx the same range as B26. But the question is, is the antenna good enough to catch the offset of the B18/B19 range?

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Hi,

I’m very interested in knowing how the FP3 is doing in Japan? Did you end up buying it?

Thanks for the feed-backs.

Read this article before I set off to Japan. Thought to just give it a try. Now touring in Japan with FP3 I installed data SIM from IIJmio and it works fine everywhere on 4G/LTE.
Cheers!

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The FP1 worked well last year. Good to know the FP3 is maintaining a friendly relationship with Japan.

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So I finally got my phone…BUT where I live the NTT docomo does not have sufficient coverage. Going to try an AU sim and see if it will work :crossed_fingers:
If it doesn’t i’ll try IIJmio and if it still doesn’t…i’ll cry :sweat_smile:

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Great to hear, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you, that you find a good provider really soon!
:+1:

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Ah I take it back. It seems like only in my house it doesn’t work but outside it is fine on NTT. I’m debating on whether to change or not…coverage could be worse if I switch…

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Do other phones work inside your house with an NTT sim? In that case it sounds like you’re indeed missing a low-frequency band as high frequencies have more trouble to pass through walls.

Wikipedia tells me IIJmio operates on the NTT network so it would not make much of a difference.

From the table in your post, I see that Y!Mobile supports band 8 at 900MHz, and from willmyphonework.net (which sadly only includes the FP1/2) I see that SoftBank supports 3G on 900MHz.

I don’t know whether those operators cover your area, but if they do they might be worth a try. Falling back to 3G inside your home would be less bad than getting disconnected entirely.

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My Fairphone 3 works perfectly in Japan
I got my Fairphone 3 delivered to Japan a few days ago and it works smoothly with a Japanese and German SIM card in Dual SIM mode. I hope my experience can help other people:
Model: FP3, Android Version 10,
Delivery: My parents sent it to me from Germany with DHL Express (the “Express” is important because only they allow Lithium Ion Batteries). Delivery ~90€ and additional ~30€ for customs.
Network: my network providers are IIJmio (Japanese Sim) and Fonic Mobile (German Sim). Both connect via NTT Docomo. The FP3 automatically connected via the right APN (not even my previous Japanese phone did this automatically).
After one week of using it in Tokyo, I did not encounter a single problem with my FP3.

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