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Global Capability of 4g Phones

Hello All,

I travel a lot for work and will actually, in July, begin a 2 year tour of duty in West Africa. The country I'm going to right now only supports GSM in the 900 Mhz spectrum and I'm curious if anyone knows if any of the upcoming 4g phones from Verizon will be able to operate on this service?

I was hoping to be able to pop the 'LTE' Sim Card out of the back of the phone and pop in a local sim card from Orange, much like people who have ATT do now.

I've done as much research as I possibly can online on the subject, but seem to keep coming up short, any suggestions would be most helpful, thank you all for your insight!

Comments

willzzz99

No it won't work at the MOMENT because VZW does not have any GLOBAL PHONES that support 4G. You need to get a 3G global phone and VZW will only support roaming on them with the Vodafone NL-VZW SIM card but it's only for occasional travel ($1.99/minute) and the authentication is going through Europe on the Vodafone-VZW partnership (Vodafone in Europe owns 45% of VZW in the US.)

1. You need to get a global VZW phone (BB 9650, a few others)

2. If you want to use a non VZW-Vodafone 3G roaming SIM card you need to get VZW to "unlock" the device so it will take any providers SIM card. You can do this through a 3rd party (pay for MEPD code on BB, similar on Moto's) or VZW will give it to you if you satisfyed your contract.

*Note that unlocking your phone VZW voids all support responsibility for the device as they can only support devices when roaming on the official VZW-Vodafone SIM card.

Data on the BB's requires setting a special APN on the device from the service provider.

Voice/SMS will automatically work when booted with whatever SIM.

The global VZW 3G devices (BB) support 3G (UMTS/HSPA) worldwide on the EU/Asia/Africa bands (2100MHz used in Europe, Asia and Africa, essentially non-Americas) and 2G/GSM/EDGE worldwide (quad-band). If you get the newer Droid 2 Global and/or Droid Pro those support 3G worldwide even in the Americas (850/1900/2100MHz 3G UMTS/HSPA).

willzzz99

If your using the VZW Vodafone SIM in Africa the authentication is probably going through a authentication roaming global GRX center in Europe where VZW has physical and virtual IT infrastructure. SImilarly in Asia. VZW outsources their global roaming to a company called Syniverse if your curious.

JeffreyHanley

Thank you for the update Will. I had suspected that this would be the answer.

I was hoping that one of Verizon's upcoming 4G phones would have a radio antenna that not only worked on the LTE and CDMA network, but that was also quad band and could pick up the four GSM spectrums..... and had firmware/software that was backwards compatible, plus the ability to pop any local sim card in the back of it when abroad.

I guess that was a lot to ask for :smileyindifferent: I suppose I will have to break down and buy one of the droid global phones or.... sigh... switch to ATT and get a global phone from them :smileysad:

Thank you so much for the help, and of course if anyone else has extra input I'd love to hear it. In today's global world I am sure there are more people out there like me who just simply need their phones to work wherever they might end up.

Thanks again

willzzz99

VZW, AT&T and T-Mobile are the same and they both lock their phones but again call CSR and get the correct dept. they can give you the unlock code if you met your contract requirements.

Sprint is the ONLY carrier in the US I know of that has the GSM portion of their global phones (9650, etc.) unlocked out of the box.

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