HTC HD7 switching between bands

[Anonymous]

Hello all,
The basic problem us we live on the outskirts of a town with open countryside, this is lovely but has limited cell phone coverage.
Over the last three years I have tried all of the cell phone providers ending up with Orange via UMA, this was ok but not stable enough to be reliable.
My neighbour howver had an old O2 phone on GSM, this worked fine so just to be sure I bought an O2 SIM which I tried myself, Great I thought and ordered the above phone.
Phone arrive, switch on little or no reception, yet my O2 older handset sat next to it shows wall to wall coverage.
Then I realise the HTC is trying to find either 3G or HSPA occasionally dropping onto the edge service which I guess is GSM - for some reason it only shows a couple of bars with call quality quite poor, it also drops calls and sometimes cannot connect to live mail.
Help!
Thanks in advance,

[adamtemp64]

in settings can you turn 3g off or force gsm only.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply, I did think of doing exactly that but then thought its a bit of a fiddle as I am in and out of the house all day.
The photo shows 3G but it does fluctuate onto 'EDGE' which is the same as the phone next to it, the difference is the signal maybe one bar?

[Anonymous]

Just to add to the above;
The constant cycling between bands is having a real knock on effect with the battery, not even a 10th of my old Blackberry.

[Anonymous]

I had another go at resolving this problem by looking at various ways of getting a better signal.
Part of the problem seems to be the phone constantly switching between all of the available frequencies including HSPA.
Correct me if I am wrong but all voice and data traffic uses 900MHz until something faster is detected then it switches only the data to say 3G?
I never bothered to disable the 3G option as recommended above as I mistakenly thought email would stop working after it left the local WiFi network.
Having now done this the phone works fine, no more grouped texts coming in as soon as you move it.
Added a silicone case too which may have helped case conductivity issues.

[adamtemp64]

voice and data on both 3g and 2g just data faster on 3g and 3g can do data and voice at the same time

[Anonymous]

"3g can do data and voice at the same time"
ahh, so it does pull it off the 900MHz band onto 3G/HSPA, this would explain the problem.
I am correct in saying GSM is 800MHz, GPRS is 900Mhz and 3G 2100MHz (not sure about HSPA)

[adamtemp64]

gsm (voice) and gprs/ edge (data) 900/1800 3g utms (data and voice) 900/2100 hspa is 3g
If you search you will see more info on wiki
800 mhz not yet used (analogue tv) but will be used for 4g along with 2600 mhz after 4g auction
http://www.o2.com/cr/what_are_radio_waves.asp

[Anonymous]

Thanks, had a good look around on wiki, lots of info.
One question is edge (E) the same as gprs (G) the reason I ask is my Windows phone sometimes displays either an E or an G if 3G/HSPA is switched off.
Icons here http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/e ... -mean.aspx

[adamtemp64]

Yes as I said above edge is faster than GPRS bit runs on 2 g network