Why no 700MHz LTE in Windsor & surrounding area?

[Pskippy]

I frequently travel to Windsor (once, sometimes twice per year). Every time I go, I'm always surprised at how bad LTE coverage is there. I spend a lot of time in the more rural Amherstburg area and LTE signal is usually 1 bar on my iPhone 6. As a result, connectivity isn't the greatest. I check my phone's field test mode and it's always band 2 or 4. Checking cell tower maps with data from Industry Canada show that Telus hasn't deployed 700MHz on any of their sites in that area. Does anyone know what's taking them so long and when we can expect them to? Rogers doesn't have nearly as many towers there yet my family members who have Rogers iPhones consistently get 3-4 bars of LTE service because Rogers has deployed 700MHz on nearly all of their towers in the region. I know Bell and Telus share the infrastructure but Windsor is one of a few Eastern Canada regions where Telus owns and operates the RAN so tower upgrades and maintenance in Windsor is their responsibility and not Bell's.

[Nighthawk]

The most common LTE bands used by Telus are Band 4 (1700/2100MHz) and Band 2 (1900MHz). Band 2 is one of the newer ones and has been deployed in the Windsor area and the iPhone should work with it. Both Band 4 and 2 appear to be widely deployed in the Windsor area.

700MHz is still being deployed from info I can find and out east there are only a handful of towers in Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City that offer it. Most of the few 700MHz towers in the region appear to be in Quebec. Bell doesn't appear to offer 700MHz near Windor either. They have far fewer towers than Telus does in the area. Come out to western Canada if you want 700MHz right away. Plenty of towers here offer it. 🙂

If you're having reception issues near Amherstburg, the best thing you can do is use Telus's app to report problems with signal reception.

[Pskippy]

Thanks for the quick reply. I'm not going to bother with the network app to report the problem because, quite frankly, I find it completely useless. I've submitted feedback thru the app dozens of times in the past several years with zero results. I'm aware of band 2 as my iPhone 6 seems to camp on that band almost everywhere I am (even where I live). But in my opinion, they (Bell and Telus) REALLY need to adopt Rogers' strategy of deploying 700MHz everywhere, especially in more rural areas like Amhersburg. And I'm pretty sure the Bellus RAN in the Windsor area is maintained by Telus (like parts of Ottawa and Quebec). It doesn't matter if Bell doesn't have as many sites in the area since the Bellus network is one single shared RAN, so Telus customers' experience will be the same as Bell customers' experience in Windsor and everywhere else across Canada. They just each operate and maintain different sections of the RAN across the country to make the network sharing agreement more economical. So the push for 700MHz LTE needs to be a joint effort between both Bell and Telus. They have the spectrum and resources to do it...just don't understand why 700MHz is so scarce in general overall compared to Rogers. It probably has something to do with the fact that there's less 700MHz spectrum so speed would be greatly reduced with its use, which would in turn oppose Bellus' claim to be the "fastest network" in Canada. But in my opinion, coverage and signal strength trump speed.