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North American Desire in UK - cannot enable 3G

S

snowballer

Lurker
Hi,

I have a Canadian HTC Desire, absolutely love it, one of the best pieces of electronics I have ever owned. I moved to the UK and have a T-Mobile sim and account. Yes, of course the phone is unlocked. However, for mobile broadband, it will only connect at a low bandwidth... the display indicates "G".

I've been through the settings with Tmobile assistance 10 times over and we can't figure out how to get the 2g or 3g working! It worked fine in Canada. According to Tmobile " 900/1800/2100 across 2G/3G/HSDPA" is used for their network. Can anyone help me figure out why my internet is so slow?

Thanks
 
Well you have the 2G working - that's what "G" means.

As for 3G, I suspect that your handset doesn't support the European 3G bands (900 and 2100, though T-Mobile has no 900 MHz spectrum). There are at least 3 different "GSM Desire" models. Each is dual-band 3G, but with different pairs of bands. Europeans ones support 3G in the 900 MHz and 2100 MHz bands, but neither of those is used for 3G in North America (certainly not the USA, and I'm pretty sure not in Canada either). So my guess is that your phone supports 3G in the 850 and 1900 bands, neither of which is available in Europe - both are used for other things here, same as the European bands are allocated for other uses over there.

Unfortunately this is a hardware difference, so nothing can be done about it.
 
Yes, those are then GSM bands, i.e. 2G.

The question is, what are its UMTS (or WCDMA or HSPA - too many names) bands? All (GSM) Desires are quad band GSM, it's the 3G bands that differ.
 
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