One of the more confusing elements of LTE/4G coverage here in North America is which carrier is using which band. It is something that carriers themselves don’t exactly come out and share readily for the most part and for consumers, if you are looking at a phone on Amazon or Ebay, you just want to make sure that it will give you the LTE speeds you want while on-the-go. To that end, I’ve put together this post listing all of the carriers that support LTE and the bands that they use. The idea here is to give you a simple primer to look and see if the phone you may be looking at purchasing is going to support 4G with your carrier.
To start, I’m only going to list those carriers in Canada, Mexico and the United States that support LTE. If the carrier doesn’t support LTE (or they didn’t list it at least in their documentation) then they are not listed in this post. I have also listed parenthetically the 3G(UMTS) and 3.5G(HSPDA+) frequencies for each carrier in the list below. As these things go, this will be a living document of sorts and as more carriers pick up more bands, I’ll update the article.
Canada LTE Supported Carriers
- Bell Canada: (850/1900) LTE: 4/7/17
- MTS: (850/1900) LTE: 4
- Rogers Wireless: (850/1900) LTE: 4/7/17
- Sask Tel: (850/1900) LTE: 4/38
- Telus Mobility: (850/1900) LTE: 4
- Videotron: (850/1900) LTE: 4
Keep reading after the break for Mexico and the United States.
Mexico LTE Supported Carriers
- Movistar: (850/1900) LTE: 4
T-Mobile Carrier LTE Information via Signal Spy
- Nextel: (1700) LTE: 4
- Telcel: (850/1900) LTE: 4
United States LTE Supported Carriers
- AT&T: (850/1900) LTE: 2/4/17
- T-Mobile: (1700/1900) LTE: 2/4/12
- 420 Wireless: (850/1900) LTE: 4/17
- Alaska Communications/GCI: (850/1900) LTE: 4
- Consumer Cellular: (850/1900) LTE: 4/17
- Cricket Wireless: (850/1900) LTE: 2/4/17
- H2O Wireless: (850/1900) LTE: 4/17
- MetroPCS: (1700/1900) LTE: 4
- Mosaic Telecom: (1700) LTE: 4
- Net10 Wireless: (850/1700/1900) LTE: 4/17
- Simple Mobile: (1700/1900) LTE: 4
- Straight Talk: (850/1700/1900) LTE: 4/17
Hopefully this will help clear up some of the confusion around the carrier LTE bands and give you the information you need to make that next phone purchase.
Keep in mind this information does change from time-to-time and no, I do not guarantee it will work with every phone. 🙂
