This morning, Motorola took the wraps off of their third smartphone this week, the Moto X Force. Essentially, it’s a Droid Turbo 2 for the international markets, including that shatter-proof display. Which is something many of us are excited about. We weren’t too surprised to see this announced for Europe, Latin America and Asia, as Motorola has done this in the past with Droid devices. It also led to many of us wondering if we could indeed import the Moto X Force into the US and use it on AT&T and T-Mobile. The answer to that is yes, but let’s explain a bit.
Bands that are used in Europe are slightly different when compared to the US. European bands are closer to what is used in Asia, while the US usually needs their own variant due to the carriers here. Luckily the Moto X Force supports a ton of bands (thanks to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810), all of which are listed on Motorola’s page for the Moto X Force. We’re looking at GSM 850/900/1800/1900, HSPA+ 850/900/1700/1900/2100 and 4G LTE Band 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 17, 20, 25, 28 and 40.
Now for T-Mobile, they use band 2, 4 and 12 for LTE (with 12 being the important one as it’s the 700MHz band). However Band 12 does not support VoLTE on T-Mobile, just data (that’s a device thing, not T-Mobile’s network). For HSPA+ they use the 1700/1900/2100 bands, all of which are supported and for GSM they use 1900 which is also supported.
Over on the AT&T side, on their LTE network they use bands 2, 4, 5, and 17. For HSPA+ it’s the 850/1900 band and finally for GSM its the 850 and 1900 bands. All of which are supported on the Moto X Force. So you could go ahead and import the Moto X Force and use it on either AT&T and T-Mobile. Just pop in your SIM card and you’re good to go. But on the T-Mobile side, it’s important to remember there won’t be any VoLTE here. You’ll still get great data speeds indoors, just not great for voice calls. However if you use Google Voice, that won’t make a difference, anyways.
So there you have it. You can technically bring the Moto X Force into the US and use it on either T-Mobile or AT&T without any real issues. And that’s the beauty of a GSM network, that isn’t locked down like CDMA networks.