mobile

Hello all,

My question, in a nutshell, is: Has anybody successfully added additional LTE or UTMS bands to their i9295?

There's quite a bit of detail online in the following threads about doing this for the S5 and other variants of the S4 Active:

- http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=2441211
- http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=2721726
- http://forum.xda-developers.com/show....php?t=2291589
- http://forum.xda-developers.com/gala...s-to-t2886059/

My own proposition is, I'm travelling from the UK to Southern California at the end of the month, with my S4 Active LTE (i9295). In the past, I've used my old HTC Sensation XE, which had the peculiarity of being an international model which supported 1700MHz for 3G on T-Mobile USA, so getting a T-Mobile SIM on their /day tariff was always perfect.

I'm currently running the stock (but rooted) 5.0.1 firmware. I'm aware if I do approach this in the same way as the threads above I may need to install at least a new kernel, if not a custom ROM, to circumvent Qualcomm's protections.

Another question I have is about T-Mobile US's 3G/4G coverage in San Diego, Palm Springs and Los Angeles. I will find another forum to ask this in, but in case anyone can point me to any intel on this, I'm keen to understand whether there's coverage of UTMS/HSPA on band 2 (1900MHz) and/or LTE on band 1 (2100MHz), and whether LTE band 1 will work without band 4. If SoCal has this coverage, then I may be able to use my phone as-is, having compared band information here:
- http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i929...ctive-5446.php
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-Mobil...spectrum_chart