Why Don't LTE Phones Support All Bands?

[Wardrop]

What is the biggest barrier preventing a phone manufacturer from supporting all LTE bands on their LTE phones, rather than a sub-selection of bands or just one as it in some cases. If it's the SoC manufacturers, what's preventing them from doing a all-in-one LTE SoC? Would I be correct to assume it's due to the overhead of getting the required certification for all LTE bands in all the different countries?

 

[cyclistca]

The want to met a price point or they are only interested in serving certain markets.

 

[XenIneX]

Radios are difficult. So are antennas. You can fake proper tuning to a certain degree with software defined radios, but that comes at the expense of efficiency, and thus power consumption.

If someone can figure out a way to wedge radios, power amplifiers, and antennas for all ~38 LTE bands -- plus dual-band MIMO WIFI, bluetooth, NFC, and however many legacy 3G bands don't overlap 4G -- in a single device will make more money than you can imagine. But I doubt it will happen any time soon.

 

[shabby]

The lumia 920 probably has the most lte support http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_lumia_920-4967.php

 

[ViRGE]

Power amps and transceiver ports. Every band requires its own power amp, and in turn every power amp must be connected to one of a limited number of transceiver ports. So it's essentially a hardware/space restriction.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6295/...ous-voice-and-lte-or-evdo-svlte-svdo-support-