Phone with no B20 (800 DD) - how it will affect usage?

[Robertino]

Hello Vodafone support,

Let me start with saying 191 is useless piece of automated voice ##~## where you cannot get to talk to human being. Being not the cheapest network in UK, you cannot afford operator to be there and pick up the phone? And I was advised via live chat to dial 191 to speak to somebody, yeah right.

But you do have the best network in London. I have tried Three, EE - both are so far behind Vodafone. I`m now on Galaxy S7 and looking to change phone. Phone I`m looking at supports following bands:

FDD-LTE:

B1 - 2100
B2 - 1900 PCS
B3 - 1800+
B4 - 1700/2100 AWS 1
B5 - 850
B7 - 2600
B8 - 900

TD-LTE:

B38 - TD 2600
B39 - TD 1900+
B40 - TD 2300
B41 - TD 2500

Doesn`t support HSPA+ and LTE-A.

As you can see there is no band 20 (800 DD), which is used by Vodafone for 4G, I would only have B7 (2600). What would this mean in every day use? No 4g signal? Very weak signal/slow 4g browsing? No reception between tall building in central London? How loosing B20 would affect voice calls? Is it even used for voice calls?

I`m trying to understand if I`m willing to sacrify some network quality for a better phone. I hope there are some decent Vodafone support people with technical knowledge. Thanks.

[Jenny]

@Robertino - The 2600MHz frequency is only used in places like football stadiums and arenas – it covers a large number of people, in a smaller area.

This isn’t something that you’ll pick up generally, as we use the 800MHz frequency for our overall 4G coverage.

To clarify, our 2G uses the 900MHz frequency and 3G uses 2,100MHz - to improve our 3G service indoors, we also started operating it on 900MHz frequency in some areas.

You can find more information on Vodafone network and frequencies on our blog.

[PedroC1999]

Vodafone has 4G on a huge variety of bands now:

800MHz (B20)-base coverage layer

1800MHz (B3)-additional coverage to certain areas in London, Brighton. Coverage extremely limited.

2100MHz (B1)-very extensive coverage in South London, Manchester, Birmingham and other top Western cities.

2600MHz (B7)-extremely urban centres of top few cities, extensive in South London.

2600MHz (B38)-one or two sites. 

[lightspeed2398]

The information about 3G is a bit out of date. To say started deploying is an understatement, rebuilding the network since 2013 completely with a 3G900 layer would be more correct. Additionally 2100 as 3G might not be around too much longer, the spectrum is much better used on 4G.... 

[qasdfdsaq]

tl;dr: Over 90% of Vodafone's 4G coverage is 800Mhz only so buying a phone that has no access to it is a bad idea. You'll basically get no signal whatsoever in the east side of the country and weak (albeit very fast) signal in big city centres in the west of the UK.

For voice calls the 3 network limits voice calls to band 20 only but Vodafone doesn't officially do voice over LTE anyway.

The Galaxy S7 is already just about perfect for Vodafone's network as it supports all the bands and all the carrier aggregation combinations.