Planned support for more LTE bands

Discuss The Products
1

Do you we expect Fairphone will ever support any of these LTE bands:

  • |LTE|B1 (2100)
  • |LTE|B8 (900)
  • |LTE|B9 (1800)
  • |LTE|B11 1500 Lower
  • |LTE|B18 (800 Lower)
  • |LTE|B19 (800 Upper)
  • |LTE|B21 (1500 Upper)
  • |LTE|B28 (700 APT)
  • |LTE|B41 (TD 2500)

I bought a Fairphone for my wife in 2017, I could have sworn that NTT Docomo had an LTE band supported, I thought there was only 1, so it was a risk. I thought it was worth it for all the good reasons, but my wife only gets 3G coverage and I don’t see any LTE support on the 3rd party service for Japan anymore (maybe I imagined it).

That plus the battery life being very low now is making me think about options. Will any of the above bands every be supported by a Fairphone replacement module? If not, are there any “fair” phone alternatives that people could recommend for Japan?

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2

I don’t think that the FP2 will ever support additional LTE bands. But the FP2 should work in Europe anyway.

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3

According to https://willmyphonework.net/ FP2 can operate on NTT Docomo’s LTE Band 3 (what you call B9) 1800 MHz. I assume though that NTT Docomo doesn’t have all bands everywhere.

If you can find out which of the carriera have Band 3 in your area you can switch carrier to have LTE signal.

Personally, I’m still on my FP1, which “only” has 3G and I also have WiFi, so I’m not convinced yet that 4G is a must-have. :wink:

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4

I’m currently developing a new motherboard for the FP2 and I use LTE modules, instead of ICs. This makes it possible to use the FP2 in other countries and also enable more LTE bands

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5

I just got a FP2 a few days ago. I transfered my sim card which gave access to LTE to my previous phone (Mineo sim using NTT Docomo network). The FP seems to only connect to 3G (H symbol) but it’s soooo much faster than what I had before with LTE !

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6

You’re so right. LTE doesn’t always man fast. A bad baseband or tranceiver can limit the LTE speeds to speeeds similar to 3g or edge.

7

An old feature request I made a while ago lists the following official reply:

Thank you for the suggestion; it’s noted, but at the moment we don’t have concrete plans in doing so.

If you wish to pursue this further in 2019, I can suggest creating a feature request in the bugtracker for Android 7, as I suspect the Android 6 bugtracker containing my original feature request will not receive any further attention. Also: considering the long list of regressions introduced with the Android 7 release, I don’t expect such a feature request to be a high priority issue any time soon.

See also this closed topic: “Unlock LTE band 1 and 38?”

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8

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