After having had a closer look at the LTE and 5G bands used in the US in previous posts, I traveled on to Canada and obviously also took the time to have a look at how my devices would work in this country. And once again, there were a number of interesting surprises, at least … Continue reading Roaming Report – Part 10 – LTE and the Partial Lack of 5G Roaming in Canada
There are three nationwide LTE/5G networks in the US. As I could roam in all three of them when I was recently in the US, I also had a look at the bands that are requested by the third network to be reported by the UE. So here are the results:
Yes, the post titles are getting a bit long these days. Sorry about that. In this part, let’s have a look which 4G LTE and 5G NR bands for 5G Non-Standalone (NSA, ENDC) another nationwide US network requests my mobile devices to report and how this differs from the network I had a look at … Continue reading Roaming Report – Part 8 – Frequency Bands used for LTE and 5G in the US – Operator 2
As I live in Europe, I pretty much know the EU LTE and 5G frequency bands by heart. In North America, however, the frequency ranges and particularly the band numbers are significantly different, so I had a closer look which bands my devices were using while having been there, and which bands the networks asked … Continue reading Roaming Report – Part 7 – Frequency Bands used for LTE and 5G in the US – Operator 1
When I was last in the US back in 2019, I noticed that quite a number of the test smartphones (from the EU) I had with me would not do LTE Carrier Aggregation (CA). Even worse, my devices where often sent to a 5 or 10 MHz Carrier, so data transfer speeds were abysmally slow … Continue reading Roaming Report – Part 6 – 5G Roaming in the US fixes the lack of no LTE-CA on some Devices!
And yet another roaming story from my recent trip to North America: For voice and video calls to family and friends, I use my Prosody XMPP server in Germany, a voice stream reflector that is also located in the country and the ‘Conversations’ messenger app. By having all components close together, the speech path delay … Continue reading Roaming Report – Part 5 – Double Inter-Continental Voice Delay
Here’s a quick follow-up to my recent blog post on using an eSIM when roaming in the US: After I installed the eSIM, I noticed with my trace tools that whenever my smartphone connected to an LTE network, the phone would, in addition to the LTE PDU session for Internet connectivity, request another PDU session … Continue reading Roaming Report – Part 4 – When the SIM card talks to the Internet
After a bit of a disappointing prepaid eSIM (non-) experience directly from US network operators, I switched to plan B and had a look if I could get an eSIM for use in the US from one of the global eSIM roaming platforms. Two years ago, I checked out Airalo when I was roaming in … Continue reading Roaming Report – Part 3 – Airalo – 5 Minutes to the eSIM
While I was in the US, I was using my German SIM card to roam through the different networks. When using a German SIM card, however, all IP data traffic goes back from the US to Germany and from there to the Internet. As the servers for my self-hosted services are in Europe, that’s not … Continue reading Roaming Report – Part 2 – Getting a Local US eSIM – How Hard Can it Be?
It’s March 2024 and for the first time in 5 years (thank you Covid pandemic), I was in the US again. So far, so good, but there is one significant difference this time, at least from a technical point of view: For the first time ever, I’m roaming with Verizon! Most travelers won’t even notice, … Continue reading Roaming Report – Part 1 – Roaming with Verizon – A First!