LTE™ coverage for Xperia™ smartphones

LTE networks are getting more and more common, allowing you to browse the web instantly, stream content, or download movies at high-speed. You’ll find LTE support in a number of Xperia™ smartphones, all the way from the just announced Xperia™ Z to the Xperia™ ion. Each device has a particular range of LTE bands, with corresponding regions that support the service. Read on to get the full list of LTE-enabled smartphones, supported bands, and the available countries where you can use LTE.

Among the impressive specs you’ll find for the recently announced Xperia Z – quad-core CPU, 5’ 1080p HD display, and HDR video camera – don’t forget that you’ll also find support for LTE. It’s the latest Sony superphone with LTE capability, and joins an already extensive list of Xperia™ LTE-capable smartphones.

LTE stands for 3GPP Long Term Evolution, and is a standard for wireless data communications technology and an evolution of the GSM/UMTS standards. This technology increases the capacity and speed of wireless data networks using DSP (digital signal processing) techniques and modulations that already provides peak rates of 100 Mbit/s downlink and  50 Mbit/s uplink and QoS provisions permitting a transfer latency of  10-15 ms and is evolving to beyond 300 Mbps. With LTE, the ability to manage fast-moving mobiles is supported, as well as multi-cast and broadcast streams. LTE supports scalable carrier bandwidths, from 1.4 MHz to 20 MHz and supports both frequency division duplexing (FDD) and time-division duplexing (TDD).

LTE frequency bands

The LTE standard can be used with many different frequency bands. The deployment is increasing rapidly among the world. As of today 700, 850, , 1900 and 1700/2100 MHz bands are used in North America. South America uses 700, 1700/2100 and 2600 MHz. 800, 900, 1800, 2600 MHz bands are used in Europe.  You’ll find the 850, 1500, 1800, 2100, 2300 and 2600 MHz bands used in Asia. And Australia uses 1800 MHz. As a result, phones from one country may not work in other countries. Since the LTE standard is fairly new to the operators there are very few roaming agreements between different countries and operators when it comes to LTE roaming (HSPA roaming already exists). In the future when roaming agreements are in place users will need a multi-band capable phone for roaming internationally. That will be less of an issue if you’re using an Xperia™ smartphone, as they are already multi-band capable (with the exception of Xperia™ SX) and support at least two bands or more. The table further down lists the LTE bands supported by Xperia™ smartphones.

The feature image used for this article indicates current countries in green where there is an existing (commercial) LTE network that Xperia™ smartphones can connect to. Please note that many more regions will have LTE in the near future. Furthermore, the availability of LTE networks is operator-dependent and may vary from area to area within a country.

List of LTE supported Xperia smartphones

The Xperia™ smartphones that support LTE include:

• Xperia ion (LT28i)
• Xperia TL (LT30at)
• Xperia T (LTE30a)
• Xperia V (LT25i)
• Xperia SX (SO-0SD)
• Xperia AX (SO-01E)
• Xperia Z (C6603)
• Xperia ZL (LTE C6503, C6506)

The following table further specifies the supported bands, available regions and other technical information.

To find out what Xperia™ smartphones you’ll be able to use, go through the Region section of the table to find your country and the adjacent field to see the supported models.

Have any questions or comments about LTE or what Xperia™ smartphones will work in your country? Drop us a line below.

Note: Developer World would like to give a big thanks to Olof Zander and Peter Karlsson, Master Research Engineers at Sony, for providing technical expertise for this article.

More information

• Learn more about LTE from our earlier LTE blog post.
• Get the specs on LTE-enabled smartphones: Xperia ion, Xperia TL, Xperia T, Xperia V, Xperia SX, Xperia AX, Xperia Z, and Xperia ZL (C6503)/Xperia ZL (C6506).
• Read the Wikipedia LTE article.