Not really, 700 MHz can broadcast as far as the distance from Montego Bay to Kingston if they turn the transmission power all the way up, mount the tower on the highest elevation they can find and have absolutely flat land all around, alas however, they can't. Jamaica's RF environment is raught with interference however... It's even affected the SMAs ability to issue 850 MHz, 900 MHz and AWS Licenses (which FLOW owns available every slice of btw). Digicel and FLOW use custom interference filters to improve Rx sensitivity because of this....
Last edited by Brandysull; Aug 22, 2017 at 12:54 PM.
That is very interesting to know, I have a massive, massive tree at the front of my yard. The tree covers the entire house and our section of the roadway. I guess this is the reason why I cannot get Digicels LTE inside my house. I have to go down the road, or around the backyard away from the tree. To get Digicels LTE service. Flows signal is excellent here most of the time though, rarely any interuption on 2G, HSPA+. I hope thier LTE Network will be the same here.
I did a network search on my Lumia 950 dual sim phone in the Duhaney Park area it said; Lime 3G, 2G and 338 05 forbidden .
Will Flow ever use the 850 mhz band for LTE in Jamaica ?
I think in Cayman they use the 850 band, why AWS alone in Ja?
AT&T ,I think, use 850 mhz band as well as AWS.
Last edited by dehyah; Aug 23, 2017 at 06:27 PM.
I am not sure that Flow will utilize the 850Mhz band for LTE, maybe brandysull can elaborate on that a bit. I do believe that Flow will use carrier aggregation sometime in the very near future. Band 4 AWS will be aggregated with low band spectrum by Flow. AT&T uses band 4 AWS, while thier main LTE band is either band 17 or 12 700MHz.
They're most likely to use 850 MHz in Jamaica if they don't acquire Caricel for the 700 MHz spectrum license. If they do use 850 MHz, it will 4x slower than their AWS LTE later. They can only get about 37.5 Mbit/s from it (its dimensions would be 5x5 MHz) if they squeeze GSM & UMTS into the same spectrum (or if they turn down 850 MHz 2G... which seems more likely). I suppose that if they use Band 5, it'll solely be for VoLTE purposes. Their 3G layer as of this month got a huge upgrade, making it quite ubiquitous; heightening the possibility of a GSM turndown. These are FLOW's 2 options. I've studied the situation quite a bit.
P.S. FLOW Cayman uses 10 MHz of Band 17 LTE and, as of August 2016, upgraded to LTE-A and now uses 5 MHz of Band 2 (1900 MHz) LTE. It is however only accessible in and around the city of George Town. They own around 15 MHz of 1900 MHz spectrum in Cayman so, they have to use it sparingly.