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Help Support for different radio frequencies (bands)

M

McG

Newbie
What is the overhead for phone manufacturers to include support for extra frequency bands? To offer a simple example, for full 3G coverage in the US a phone needs to support 850MHz and 1900MHz and in Europe it needs 900MHz and 2100Mhz. Phones which support all four of these bands are rare. Why is that? Practically every phone these days supports all four 2G bands (850, 900, 1800, 1900).

So what is the cost to manufacturers? I don't think it's the hardware - most radio chips seem to support every frequency under the sun. The antenna? I would imagine that phone antennae are a compromise anyway and if one is designed for, say 850MHz and 2100MHz, then it would also handle 1900MHz.

Why don't manufacturers include support for every band? Your thoughts please.
 
funkylogik said:
Maybe they have to pay some kind of license to include the bands? (total guess lol)
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Yup that's pretty much it, licensing and approvals. That's what costs the real money. Many phones here in China don't have the North American cellular bands and don't have FCC approvals. Which for most is not a problem, because they're not going to the US or Canada.
 
You know your stuff FL. :)

What happens is, many phones are often OK globally for 2G/EDGE, which is old tech, but it's 3G and 4G where they're not. For example the Oppo Find 7. there's three distinct versions of it. There's an American one, which has American 3G and 4G bands, and is FCC approved, a European one which has the European bands and is approved for various countries in the EU, plus CE approval, but is OK in Africa, Asia, etc. as well. And there's a Chinese version which only has approvals for China, but otherwise is similar to the European version.

AFAICT some phones are truly global, should work anywhere all bands, all modes, but it's usually the more expensive flagship devices. Such as Samsung S4/S5/Note, Apple iPhone 5/6, etc.
 
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Ah right. What about the opo mate? There only seems to be one model of that (A0001) (bacon)
 
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Thank you FL and MikeD for your views.

I can believe that there is a cost to gaining approval for certain frequencies in certain jurisdictions, but consider the case where 'Phone Version 1' has two frequencies in country A and 'Phone Version 2' has two frequencies in country B - that's four approvals required (that must be paid for). What's the difference between that and a single version of the phone with all four frequencies? It's still four approvals to be paid for.

I can't believe that the FCC, for example, charges for each handset that is used on a certain band in the USA.

I have no good reason for asking this question, I just get a little frustrated when phones with amazing spec are announced that are missing bands required in the UK. The OnePlus One for instance supports 16 different bands (across 2G, 3G and 4g) but doesn't support LTE band 20 (800MHz) which makes it useless in the UK. Few reviews (even UK reviews) mention this. What stopped the manufacturer from including the one extra band that would make his flagship work on every network in Europe?
 
It would not be suprising that licensing costs are per unit (per antennae/transceiver/whatever) or per unit sold. That kind of pricing would distribute costs across all companies so that companies selling a lot of stuff pay more, but smaller companies pay less. Makes sense to me.
 
Jvook - I think that unlikely. I have had a succession of Chinese phones bought from China. The manufacturer doesn't know where the phone ended up. The retailer does - but he doesn't care and he is certainly not going to report it to any radio frequency licensing authority.

Let's say you are correct, there is a per handset fee. The difference between OnePlus paying for 16 licences and paying for 17 licences must be negligible.
 
McG said:
Jvook - I think that unlikely. I have had a succession of Chinese phones bought from China. The manufacturer doesn't know where the phone ended up. The retailer does - but he doesn't care and he is certainly not going to report it to any radio frequency licensing authority.

Let's say you are correct, there is a per handset fee. The difference between OnePlus paying for 16 licences and paying for 17 licences must be negligible.
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It's all just speculation, doesn't matter anyway
 
I'm using the OnePlus One on UK network "three" and get 4g connectivity just fine but I know it's not the same on all networks
 
McG said:
Jvook - I think that unlikely. I have had a succession of Chinese phones bought from China. The manufacturer doesn't know where the phone ended up. The retailer does - but he doesn't care and he is certainly not going to report it to any radio frequency licensing authority.

Let's say you are correct, there is a per handset fee. The difference between OnePlus paying for 16 licences and paying for 17 licences must be negligible.
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Sorry this is not really an Android issue but I will respond to it anyway. You compare 16 and 17 licenses but really you might say Country A is going to need 500,000 units and Country B needs 750,000 units. Country A requires Band I and II, and Country B requires Band III and IV. Costs of supporting the bands includes hardware and/or licensing cost, doesn't matter but there is a cost.
Band I: $0.015 per unit (doesn't matter whether you pay per unit or a lump sum is averaged across the production run)
Band II: $0.830 per unit
Band III: $0.020 per unit
Band IV: $1.000 per unit

Price of supporting Bands I&II: 0.845 dollars per unit
Price of supporting Bands III&IV: 1.020 dollars per unit

So to support the bands III&IV on phones sold in Country A who can't even use them, you pay $1 extra for each phone. That's $500,000. This is not negligible for a company trying to compete in a crowded space. So they save money by cutting only to bands that work.

If you buy a flagship phone you are already paying a luxury premium so you expect more out of it and it hurts them less.

It is easy to think oh I would gladly pay $1 extra for this feature, but those little extra $1 additions can easily turn your $99 phone into a $199 phone and that is not in everyone's business model.
 
Jvook - your example is every bit as valid as mine and I thank you for taking the trouble to consider it. I wonder if anyone knows the definitive answer.

FL - your OnePlus One may well perform OK everywhere you have tried it, but the Three network bought 2 x 5MHz worth of 800MHz spectrum in the Ofcom 4G auction as well as 2 x 15MHz worth of 1800MHz spectrum, so there will be areas where Three have 4G coverage but where your OnePlus One will be restricted to 3G. All four UK networks bought some bandwidth in the 800MHz spectrum.
 
McG said:
Jvook - I think that unlikely. I have had a succession of Chinese phones bought from China. The manufacturer doesn't know where the phone ended up. The retailer does - but he doesn't care and he is certainly not going to report it to any radio frequency licensing authority.

Let's say you are correct, there is a per handset fee. The difference between OnePlus paying for 16 licences and paying for 17 licences must be negligible.
Click to expand...


Sometimes that can be real problem, where people have unknowingly bought GSM/TD-SCDMA phones, and sometimes the distributors and retailers doesn't know or doesn't care where they're going to end up. Problem with one of those things, is that they only give 3G service in China with China Mobile, anywhere else it's 2G only, or nothing at all if you have a 3G only carrier, such as 3 UK.

TD-SCDMA 3G technology was invented in China, basically so manufacturers wouldn't have to pay intellectual property licensing fees to western companies for phones sold in China. Which they have to for WCDMA/UMTS phones.

The phone I've got, Oppo Find 7a, x9007 version, I can see it's only got CCC approval, which is only for China, no CE (EU) or FCC (USA). I've used it in the UK no problem, but I know it doesn't have some of the US 3G and 4G cellular bands, like 1700, B4, B17, which might be a problem. There's many phones in China like that, and some of them just don't have US cellular bands at all.

FCC approval costs are not per handset, there's a one-off fee for each type approval. But it's not cheap, and so manufacturers may avoid them, if a particular phone is not for the US market.
 
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I started off vaguely wondering why manufacturers didn't include more mobile bands and here I am delving into certification web sites. I need to get a life...........
 
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