[LG V30 Guides, News, & Discussion] gilnfld:
Hi there fellas,

Thanks for the responses/comments. I had some time yesterday after work so I dedicated a couple of hours to testing the LTE band situation testing it in the same area with both the US998 software and then Canadian H933 software to determine some discrepancy and, here are my findings. Just as some background logistic info I am out east in St. John's, my carrier is Bell and LTE reception is not the greatest in many parts BUT for my testing I did it outside our house where we get good connectivity including LTE-A (advanced) under the 700mhz range bands. For my testing I used two main apps, LTE Discovery and Network Signal Guru.

- First of all, as you probably know the two main LTE bands that ALL of the Canadian telecoms use here is band 4 AWS and Band 7. As far as that is concerned the US998 software is certainly not lacking and as [MENTION=3116388]jcsww[/MENTION] mentions in his reply to you you will not be missing those. Now regarding band 66 on Freedom it might not be enabled by default in your US998 software, not sure, but it can be enabled via the Hidden Menu/Shortcut Master.

- So, in terms of Band availability for basic LTE the US998 certainly the key bands namely 4 and 7 but also the older 2 and 5 (more on those two later in my post) and has no problem connecting to these bands as measured by Network Signal Guru. Things were not as smooth connecting to one of the 700mhz bands. The canadian software/modem for the H933, unlike the US998 not only has an LTE icon but also indicates LTE+ or LTE-A in areas where the signal/band combinations allows for LTE Advanced with much more robust DL/UL speeds. I am not sure about rest of Canada but in my neck of the woods most of the time I am connected to LTE-A/LTE+ (on any of my smartphones) is when phone jumps on one of the 700 bands (13. 17 and 29). Since the US version of the software only shows the 4G icon with the LTE to the side and does not distinguish between regular LTE and LTE advanced I had to test my speeds to confirm. In the space I was doing this test where I know for a fact there is good LTE+ connectivity I was not successful getting the phone with the US998 to connect to ANY of 700 bands for more than a few seconds at a time, whereas when I flashed the Canadian OS Signal Guru confirmed consistent LTE+ ( also confirmed with my Galaxy S8 using same SIM card) This in turn accounts for slower download speeds. This can be explained by lack of some of the 700 bands on the US998 software. Of course this is not a game changer for me since my measly 3GB monthly data plan makes me not so concerned with getting those 100megabit/sec LTE+ connection as I would be tempted to gulp all that data in week maybe two max. It was just important for me to get to the bottom of this.

- To that end I still want to try and use the US998 with a Canadian Modem flashed ontop of it but so far I have not had any luck getting this to work. I tried flashing just the modem partition of the Canadian Oreo software in LGUP, on top of the US998 and it just kept bootlooping. I then tried extracting the Modem.bin file from the Canadian KDZ file and flashing with the 'dd' command via adb shell. and that just resulted in no signal at all and lost IMEI. So i had to revert back. Has anyone here on the forum managed to successfully flash the Canadian Modem/base-band from the H933 Oreo release on top of the US998 Oreo??!?

- Finally. a word about connectivity preference. I mentioned earlier the older band 2 and 5 that I believe only Bell and Telus use for LTE ( Rogers/Freedom./ Eastilink does not). While connectivity here to band 2 and 5 is NOT a problem using the US998 OS I find the speeds I get on these bands to be significantly slower than regular LTE speeds -- closer to regular HSPA/UMTS 3G Speeds. Now this is true for both the US998 OS and the stock H933 OS on our candian devices. BUT BUT what i had noticed after converting it to a US998 software is that it almost ALWAYS favored using these two slower LTE bands than either the faster Band 4 or 7. Using Netwrork Signal Guru i could confirm that where my phone on stock Canadian Oreo OS had no problem connecting to either Band 4 or 7, once converted to a 998 the phone would insist on connecting to bands 2 or 5 at slower speeds - - in the exact same area. What then decided to do is to actually disable band 2 and 5 and force the phone to use 4 and 7 as the go-to bands for basic LTE. This has actually helped tremendously as I get good exceptionally bold signal of Band 4 around this area of town.

OK sorry for being so long-winded. Will leave it at that for now. Looking forward to getting some feedback from other Canuck users here with converted/frankensteined H933 to US998.

Cheers,

gs