Has anyone noticed?
 

Has anyone noticed?

A couple of things.

1. Ekit has refreshed their offerings on eBay [both US & UK].
Their US and Canada SIM says this about Canadian network coverage:
What band do those Canadian networks use?

2. Today, in southern California [between downtown LA and Disneyland, where I live], I had trouble logging on to an AT&T MVNO on thr 850mH band. I thought this might be a refarming issue but latter in the day was able to connect. Has anyone noticed loss of GSM ability on 850 or 1900 in the US due to refarming??

with a quad band phone, how do you know what band you are using? I can see (on Froyo) which network it's on, but not the frequency

According to MobileWorldLive.com, 3G on 1900 & 850 and LTE on AWS (1700/2100)

a Panasonic Tri-band
 

Actually, I have an older Panasonic Tri-band phone and that has an american version with 850/1800/1900 and lets me choose any one of those bands and also 850/1900. This is perfect for american tinkerers. The model is G-51U [U=USA]. [The G-51M & G-51E had the bands: 900/1800/1900 and the combos 900/1800 & 900/1900.]

More modern phones tend not to let you choose these things. I have a simple quad band Samsung that lets you choose quad or 900/1800 or 850/1900. That does not let you do what I can do with the Panasonic.

I can confirm that EKit Simple Calling no longer roams on GSM in (Western) Canada, including for existing sims (mine is several years old).

It was working fine when last called from on July 5th with a GSM-only phone, but today that phone now doesn't register on anything. Trying the sim in another phone, it can roam on both Telus and Rogers on UMTS, but again nothing on GSM.

There was no notice to existing customers that the ability to roam in Canada on GSM would be removed.

I was keeping one Simple Calling sim alive as a backup, but when this runs out now I won't bother, as it just stayed in the GSM-only phone. They may turn off other roaming without warning as well.

My main North American sim is T-Mobile prepaid. Cheaper in the US, a bit more expensive (but reliable!) in Canada, pricey but usable at a pinch (and for incoming sms) in Mexico and much of Europe.

Unfortunately few modern phones including all Android phones I owned so far allow a band selection or even have a field test mode that would reveal the used frequency band. Interestingly the most restricted smartphone of all, the iPhone, has a field test mode which shows the number of the current radio channel, which enable identification of the current frequency band. Just dial *3001#12345#* to enter the field test mode and find the "AR FCN" (Absolute Radio Frequency Channel Number) somewhere under GSM Cell Environment or UMTS Cell Environment (don't have an iPhone so can't provide more detailed instructions).
And these are the AR FCN for the GSM bands:

GSM850 128–251
GSM1900 512–810

GSM900 1–124
EGSM900 0,975–1023
GSM1800 512–885

Obviously GSM1800 and GSM1900 have overlapping channel numbers but you can rule out one of these bands as you usually know on which continent you are.

For UMTS channels there's an overview at UMTS frequency bands - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bell Mobility and Telus Mobility both use W-CDMA (3G) but do not support 2G GSM. Only Rogers/Fido supports 2G GSM.


As far ast AT&T both T and DT are in the process of re-farming their spectrum for 3G. It may be that in peak use times if you're trying to connect with either 2G GSM or 3G W-CDMA over-saturation my make calling unreliable or unavailable.

I have started a new thread with ekit's current: I am pretty sure that when I bought the SIM, it allowed roaming on 3G in Canada [Bell Mobility & Telus]. It does NOT do Canada anymore So be aware.