Find Out The 4G Band Your Smartphone Supports Before Buying or Swapping 4G SIM

That your phone is 4G enabled is not a guarantee it will work on all network or with all SIM cards. Do you know that all the 4G network providers have different Bands and Frequency on which their networks work? So this is my main reason why am revealing this to you beforehand so that you won't regret later when your 4G phone fails to work with a certain network.

I would advise you to carefully check the specifications of the phone you want to buy or the your current phone to find out the 4G band it supports. Popular phone makers like Samsung, Sony, LG make different variants of the same phone. They normally look alike physically but have different features in real sense. For example, Galaxy S5 has up to five variants. These variants usually support different LTE bands across themselves. So, you need to make sure that the variant you are buying has support for the LTE band of your service provider. 

Meanwhile, phone makers like Tecno, Infinix normally have a single variant, and those variant support LTE band 1, 3, 7, 20,. They are most popular bands in Asia, Middle East and Africa. 

4G LTE BAND OF NTEL, MTN, SPECTRANET, SMILE, & GLO NETWORKS

✔ Ntel uses band 3 (1800mhz) and band 8 (900mhz)

✔ Spectranet and Swift both use band 40 (2300mhz)

✔ MTN uses band 7 (2600mhz) and 20 (800MHz)

✔ Smile uses band 20 (800mhz)

✔ Glo uses band 28 (700MHz) 

In other words, LTE bands are scattered across devices and networks. In general, 4g LTE has different network transmission bands which includes 1,2,3,7,20,21,28 etc. While some of the bands are popular among many smartphones, few of them are not really popular and available on most phones and unfortunately Glo 4G band reportedly falls on band 28 which is hard to find as over 80% of popular 4G phones in Africa and Nigeria in particular don't support band 28 including Infinix Hot S 

   

To make matters worse, none of the Infinix or Tecno LTE devices support band 28/700mhz. Glo got this one really wrong.

Meanwhile, if you aren't sure if your device supports band 28/700mhz, send 4G to 400 in an SMS using your glo sim.

GLO just rushed their LTE , they are not really ready. What NTel did is called refirming of the 900 and 1800mhz band to roll out LTE.

WHICH NETWORK OPERATOR HAS THE BEST 4G LTE? 

The only opertaor with LTE on mobile with true LTE coverage is MTN. They are the only one that bided for the 2600 band that u will find on most mobile phones. MTN LTE bands is 800 and 2600 bands and they have more than 1000 sites already. 

If u really want to use LTE without hassles, i recommend MTN or Ntel if you have the service in your location. 

CONCLUSION

Please make sure you check the specifications of your smartphone or the one you want to buy very well. Do a better research before buying as not all phones that supports 4G LTE will work on your SIM. Find out the 4G band support of the phone and also compare it with the 4G support of your preferred network to avoid stories that touches the heart later. Thank you. 

If you have any question, feel free to ask via the comments sections below and also remember to hit the SHARE buttons below as some of your friends might need this information as well.