Quote:
Originally Posted by red-beard
AT&T works worldwide. If that is an issue...
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That's a sweeping statement.
Quad band GSM phones (all of them since about 2000 or so) broadly speaking, "work" anywhere with GSM service (like, not rural India or China, which I believe still widely use CDMA outside metro areas), for voice.
Data gets complicated quickly once you want to go faster than technologies like GPRS (2G) or EDGE (2.5G). I think you'll find that high-speed data uses different frequencies in Europe, and as AT&T don't use them, their phones may not have the appropriate radio support in the chipset - particularly in older phone models. T-Mobile has compatible UMTS (3G) data frequencies with some major Euro carriers. So you can use HSDPA or HSPA+ on a T-Mobile phone with the right carrier abroad.
If the model of phone you buy has a different model # for T-Mobile and AT&T, that's really not a good sign for international data usage via UMTS. Although some recent chipsets have all 4 commonly-used data UMTS frequencies, so would work on AT&T, T-Mobile and might work in Europe, depending on the carrier you picked for the pay-as-you-go SIM...
You would certainly want an unlocked phone and a local pay-as-you-go SIM - if you thought $1 a minute international voice roaming was a rip-off, wait till you see the bill for data roaming. Ask the guy who ran up a $30,000+ bill in a week on a cruise ship, thinking his off-shore usage wasn't being charged as international roaming...
In any case, portable 3GPP technologies like HSPA+ are about all you can hope/plan for with careful model/carrier selection; global LTE does not exist. Your LTE phone won't do LTE
anywhere else; spectrum fragmentation means that South America, Europe, Asia and Australia all use different frequencies from the US - and each other.
What the ITU considers real 4G LTE is not what you get in the US (regardless of what the press releases/marketing department say). "4G LTE" in the US is the LTE from the 3GPP spec, and strictly is "pre-4G", "3.5G" or "3.9G" according to the ITU-R (but which may, confusingly, also be referred to as "4G" - because carriers were already marketing it as that. Thanks for that Marketing Dweebs - and for re-defining "gigabyte" so that it wasn't 2^30 bytes. Muppets).
"Real 4G LTE" is "LTE Advanced". Beta-testing now - in a few markets in Europe. Not available in the US.
I pretty much stopped caring about data rates past HSDPA/HSPA+ thanks. Anything I can watch streamed native 720p over is way faster than I need to manage a server.