1900 vs 1700/2100 for Solavei

I have decided to do a test for a month between two devices running different bands to see how far T-Mobile's refarming project has come over the past year.

For those who are wondering what the heck I am talking about, the two GSM carriers in the US (AT&T and T-Mobile) are constantly fighting to switch customers between the two.  They both have their own network infrastructure so their phones communicate on different spectrum.  T-Mobile has been 1700/2100 and AT&T has been 1900.

When the merger between the two fell apart almost 2 years ago, AT&T had to pay T-Mobile something like 4 Billion dollars.  T-Mobile used a large portion of that money to start adding 3G/HSPA 1900 spectrum on it's towers across the US.  They called it "refarming" the towers.  They are mostly done with these upgrades and are focused primarily in major metropolitan areas as that is where their largest customer bases are.

My test will use a 1700/2100 phone and an AT&T 1900 phone and record my experience over the month to see how they fare against each other.


I am currently carrying a Google Nexus 5 with 1700/2100 support

The second test device is going to be an AT&T Nokia Lumia 1520 with 1900 support only.