hi team - i had zero cellular coverage with my kompakt recently, where my colleagues with normal phones had connections - it seems that OneNZ (ex vodafone) are using Band 28 (700MHz) for rural areas ie us, and mudita kompakt is missing this bandwidth - is there any possibility that this may be incorporated in future, or a one-off fix? My intended kompakt use is therefore significantly impacted by this particular missing bandwidth.
cheers
Your observations are correct. Mudita Kompakt does not support Band 28, and unfortunately this will not change in the future- with this model of Mudita Kompakt.
Hi urszula - thanks - could you please explain the design philosophy or constraints that lead you to omit band28? It seems that the other main provider in NZ is even more reliant on this bandwidth than my current one (I have just investigated to switch to try and resolve!). This would explain why for months OneNZ has been telling me that my mudita was not capable of transitioning to their removal of 3G, and I presumed it was just because their database of obscure cellular devices was deficient).
Please note this deficiency on your website so that NZers in particular (what about other global jurisdictions) can know that the kompakt will not work properly in NZ.
Cheers
Ian.
@ianp I’ve asked our team. Here’s something interesting. I was just in Australia with my Kompakt- I spent over a month there, all over the eastern part- QLD, South Australia, NSW etc & I did not have any issues with coverage- received texts & phone calls normally. I did not miss any calls & did not have any network connection problems.
@ianp I got an update about this from our team:
The lack of Band28 was not a design choice, but rather a hardware constraint determined at the component design stage..
When engineering a compact E-Ink device with specific requirements, we were limited to specific pre-certified modem configurations. The “Global” modem module we selected covers the vast majority of European and Asian bands (B1, B3, B7, B8, B20), but unfortunately, it did not include the hardware antenna support for the B28 (700 MHz APT) block used heavily in the ANZ region.
Because this is a physical hardware limitation of the modem and antenna array, we cannot enable this band via a software update.
Hopefully this makes sense.
That makes sense to me! However, as @ianp stated above, this needs to be explicitly cautioned about on the Mudita website so that other New Zealanders do not fall prey to this deficiency.
@stephenshutters Thank you for the feedback. We do list all the bands on our website & we don’t hide the fact that Band 28 is not in the list of bands. This topic was also posted on the Forum & on Kickstarter prior to anyone buying or backing the project, so we did our best to be as transparent as possible.
The device was tested in the ANZ region (I personally tested two different Kompakts last year for over a months all over AUS.)
