900/1800/1900 Whats the difference between bands?

[Guest Osiris]

Hey guys,

Im just wondering I actually have no idea the difference between bands. Im only really inquiring because it was suggested to me to improve battery life a nice trick is to Set the network selection to manual and then tell it to use whatever band produces the best signal for you.

Im just unclear on what the differences are.

And will a higher band be more intensive on the battery or what?

Im somewhat clueless with this stuff

Any info or tips appreciated.

Cheers.

[Guest Monolithix [MVP]]

Depends where you are, but afaik in the UK carriers only transmit on one band each. THe only way to improve battery life if they transmit on more than one is to constantly check your phone for the signal level and when it is low, change to another band (lower signal requires more transmitting power...).

Not worth it imho...

[Guest Osiris]

ah okay cheers man

Just out of curiosity though is there any band that is more powerful than the others or something? Or are they just types of mobile bands, with no real advantages over one another?

[Guest markgamber]

Even the lowest frequency band is high enough that there's really no practical difference in how far they'll transmit, how much power they put out and so on. It's all line of sight. Any differences at your end are more a product of your surroundings. I don't have a freq chart in front of me but generally speaking, higher frequencies were more recently allocated and take into account crowded lower frequencies and are therefore much wider and can handle more traffic. A low band, for example, might have 1 MHz allocated to it and that might allow (again, ONLY as an example, these are not real numbers) 1000 channels. A high band was probably allocated in response to cramped lower bands and might have 100 MHz allocated to it which can accomodate 100000 channels.

[Guest Samsonite]

1800 MHz systems will transmit about half as far as a 900MHz system (with the same wattage) by virtue of the inverse squared law for radio waves... O use the PCN 1800 network protocol and as a result have to have many more basestations to cover the same geographical area

When Orange and Mercury 1-2-1 ( now T-Mobile) came on to the scene, all the 900MHz frequesncies had been bought by Voda and BT Cellnet ( now mm O2) so it was a purely commercial position to use higher frequencies.