Huawei Phone Only Connects to EDGE signal

[Roberto Lambert]

Hello All,

I have a Huawei Honor 7x BND-L21 phone which was bought in Ukraine. Currently I am located in the Atlanta area and the phone only connects to the much slower Edge signal. I have traveled to Indianapolis, Charlotte, and Miami, and noticed that this phone picks up the the 4g signal as the icon changes from E to 4g. Only in Atlanta is the phone constantly connected to edge. My phone carrier is T-mobile.

In my phone settings, I have preferred network mode set to 4g/3g/2g auto. The other options available are 3g/2g auto, 3g only, 2g only.

I have installed the app LTE Discovery which shows LTE and EDGE. The only obvious thing I can gather from this app is that the EDGE signal has a higher decibel reading (-92 db for LTE vs -71 db for Edge). My guess is that the phone connects to the stronger, higher decibel signal, which happens to be edge in this case.

Any suggestions on getting the phone to connect to LTE/4g signal would be highly appreciated.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Part of the problem is that your phone's 4G LTE band support only overlaps with one of T-Mobile's bands (Band 5), and if Band 5 isn't prominent in your area, it won't be able to connect to 4G.

https://www.dtechy.com/huawei-honor-7x-bnd-l21/
https://www.t-mobile.com/support/coverage/t-mobile-network

It ought to pick up 3G/HSPA, though. What happens if you change the preferred network mode to 3G/2G, or 3G only?

 

[belodion]

18h later.

We obviously cannot help you properly if you don't respond.

 

[Roberto Lambert]

Hi B. Diddy,

Thanks for your response. It looks like in the Atlanta area there is an LTE 4 band (as per the LTE Discovery app running on my phone). However as you point out, my phone does not support band 4. Using 3G/2G only connects to Edge. If set to 3G, phone does not connect at all. I guess at this point I need to think about a new phone.