If you’re a customer of a CDMA carrier – such as Verizon, Sprint or MetroPCS – you’ll know that going abroad – especially to Europe – is not the easiest of places to take your phone. AT&T customers will tell you that being able to take their phone to a whole range of countries is pretty nice – if not killer expensive. Verizon, however, do offer Global Phones to be used around the world including a number of phones from the Droid family such as the Incredible 2 and the Droid 3. This is all fine and well but, what if you’re an LTE customer and want to enjoy the same benefits? You’re out of luck at this point of you’re on Verizon. However, it’s now rumoured that Verizon will be readying Global Roaming on select LTE handsets.
The way that they’d achieve this is by utilising the LTE radio in these handsets. LTE itself is based on GSM technology – the same that powers AT&T and T-Mobile – and as such compatible with a roughly 200 countries’ wireless technologies. The old EDGE and 3G parts of Verizon’s network fall back on the CDMA network instead of utilising their LTE portion of the network. As such this leaves a good amount of the LTE radios in phones unused, perfect for roaming.
The phones that are tipped to be turned into Global monsters so far are the HTC Rezound, Droid RAZR and its MAXX variant along with the Droid 4 and the LG Spectrum. Of course, as many roaming customers will tell you, it sure can be expensive however, for those of us with family abroad it could be just what we were looking for.