Blackberry Reviews

Perhaps you're a businessman that has to stay in touch with your clients even if you're traveling from one side of the world to another or maybe you are just someone who wants to be up to date of all the news and hips around. So, you are searching for a perfect phone that suit your needs, are you not? But what type of frequency band will you consider?

In the US, GSM services make use of two frequency bands while there are also 2 different frequency bands that were utilized by them somewhere else in the world. Considering this dilemma, a few of the notable mobile phone manufacturers such as Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson and Motorola developed a phone which can work on all four frequency bands generally known as quad-band phones.

So what about this frequency band? Let us try to know more about it.

Cellular phones make use of radio waves to transmit conversations. These radio waves can be at different frequencies. Think about this interesting record of different frequencies used by different types of radio services.

GSM cell phones make use of frequencies within 4 different frequency bands.

*850 MHz (824.2 - 848.8 MHz Tx; 869.2 - 893.8 MHz Rx)

*900 MHz (880-2 - 914.8 MHz Tx; 925.2 - 959.8 MHz Rx)

*1800 MHz (1710.2 - 1784.8 MHz Tx; 1805.2 - 1879.8 MHz Rx)

*1900 MHz (1850.2 - 1909.8 MHz Tx; 1930.2 - 1989.8 MHz Rx)

Even though 850 and 900, 1800 and 1900 are seemingly close figures, a phone that works in one frequency band sadly can not work in the frequency band next to it unless of course added as a particular extra frequency band. To contrast, when you have your FM radio tuned to a radio station at 98.1 MHz, you are able to obviously never hear what's happening on another radio station at 98.3 MHz unless of course you retune your radio. You got it? This is actually how the phone frequency band works.

Formerly, the US just used 1900 MHz for its GSM cell phone service. But in the passing years, there has been a growing amount of GSM service on the 850 MHz band simply because this kind of service is usually been used in rural areas, since it has better range than the 1900 MHz band. Nevertheless, it was also been utilized in city areas especially when the cell phone company has spare frequencies unused in the 850 MHz band and no remaining frequencies to use in the 1900 MHz band.

On the other hand, when the US began to use GSM, a few other countries with very close links to the US selected to copy the US and use the same frequencies which US used. In fact, almost without exception, all international countries which use the non-US international frequency bands have 900 MHz service.

So which frequencies are required when traveling internationally?

If you intend to make use of your phone only internationally, you need to decide if you'll be using the phone in countries which make use of the international frequencies or in countries which use the US frequencies, or in both. Nonetheless, in all common bands, 900 MHz was used internationally and the 1800 MHz will just give expanded coverage in countries that also have 900 MHz.

Nevertheless, if you intend to make use of your phone only in the US, you just have to get a dual band phone which has both 850 MHz and 1900 MHz. A single band phone with only 1900 MHz will give almost as good coverage anyway.

Summing up, if you intend to use your phone in both the US and internationally, the very best alternative is to get a quad-band phone that will work on four bands that is the 850/900/1800/1900 MHz bands.