I’m trying to make sure that if I import a phone to my country, it will likely work pretty much wherever I may go here. Most phones I’m looking at support every 4G band operated here, but I’ve noticed that on the GSM arena website, they will often give a list of supported bands for a given phone followed by a dash and a region name like ‘Asia’ or ‘international’ or ‘USA’. One of the supported bands I’m looking at is operated in my country, but seems to be pretty rare, if I use that as a criterion the list of devices shrinks considerably as does the number of brands to choose from. One particular phone I looked at only lists support for the specific band I’m looking at in it’s “-USA” list of supported bands. I’m confused by what this means for me, if that band is used in my country and I import a phone that only lists the band as supported in the US does that mean the phone wouldn’t work here if I’m in an area where the only available tower operated on such a frequency? Why not? It sounds like it’s physically capable.

The other question is, how do you assess the likelihood of this being a problem? The relative rarity of support for this band and the fact that it’s only officially supported here, but seems only to have recently been licensed for people to build infrastructure operating on that band makes me think that there are likely very few towers actually using it here, but presumably more will eventually start to do so. My current phone has lasted me 6 years, almost 7 so I’ll want to future-proof in this regard. In the time since I bought my last phone, carriers have abandoned any non VoLTE support so if the phone I bough then, hadn’t had this compatibility it would have become a brick well ahead of its time so I’m weary of something like that happening.

EDIT: Something has occurred to me that didn’t before and might answer my question, but then I guess it’d be good if anyone knew because this is only a guess on my part. Maybe the dash followed by region name is referring to model variants, as in, if you buy the US variant of the phone, then it supports these bands, and if you buy the international variant, it supports these bands etc etc. In that case, it would presumably mean that if I bought a variant model of a phone that lists support for a particular frequency band it should work anywhere in the world where those frequency bands are used not just the region mentioned after the list. I guess the trouble is that usually the sites I can find selling these phones to consumers in my market don’t go in to anywhere near that level of detail so I’d have no way of knowing which model variant it was other than simply the manufacturer’s marketing terms for their product lineup.