Hi I have a question about iPhone coverage.
What iPhone carriers cover most of the world?
If you choose a GSM carrier it will work with any GSM carrier that supports it. See: http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/
4 replies
I think you have misinterpreted my question. I wanted to know what carrier if any has the worlds largest network and supports the iPhone. Thank you for your replie I can use this for another question I had.
I know of no mobile phone network that crosses national boundries, though I suppose there may be some in the EU. As cellular carriers are generally licensed and regulated by governments and many governments have laws about foreign ownership of broadcast licenses, it's not an easy thing to be an international carrier.
What do you mean by largest? Covers the greatest geographic area? Probably one of the U.S. or Canadian networks. Covers the largest population? I'd guess one of the Chinese carriers.
The only carriers with anything approaching cross-border global reach are satellite phone service providers. Any and all cellular network service providers are limited to the country they are licensed in and in which they own bandwidth (which is, for most countries, sold by auction).
So even companies like T-mobile and AT&T which have networks in many countries (often even neighboring countries), those networks may not be using the same bandwidth spectrum as they may not have been able to license or purchase the same bandwidth in each country.
There are online resources to see what is available, but as you can see by looking through their information, the world's cellular networks are a complete hodge podge of carriers, frequencies and services and are highly differentially regulated by national governments - there is no (or at best, very limited) coordination across national boundaries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operators
Hi I have a question about iPhone coverage.