this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Did you find if it somehow lets you manually select frequency bands without rooting?
I've found some Motorola phones have this in
*#*#4636#*#*menu, even with Qualcomm SoCs. I didn't take a screenshot when I was testing one of them, but found one online:If I remember right, these can be removed/added in one of the options under 3 dots in upper right corner.
Unfortunately, only available for 4G/5G, but that's where it matters most anyway. What I really disliked however is the lack of "reset" option, and nowhere did it list all supported bands. They are added and removed from the list shown by typing in a number into a field.
This is how it looks on my current phone in separate MediaTek app (
*#*#3646633#*#*):Far better design than Motorola, though I am not sure if it's right to blame them on design of hidden menus.
Lastly, for mmcli which may be usable on PinePhone, it's
--set-current-bands=[BAND1|BAND2...]option.Anyway, it did prove itself quite useful, especially indoors and moving vehicles to get more bandwidth at the cost of reliability and battery life.
I hope the screenshot is uploaded correctly, but you can change your preferred network type! And a whole bunch of them...
Edit: this can be done by;
Settings->Network&Internet->Sims->name Sim you inserted->Preferred Network Type
It did, but this is just network type. I meant specific frequency bands.
For example (4G, my phone doesn't do 5G), indoors I may get automatically placed into Band 20 (800MHz) with less bandwidth and more load. This was especially a problem when I tried O2. During the day, I'd see around 3Mbps in this band, which was what I'd get indoors. Manually I could switch it to B3 to get the max limit of 20Mbps for the cheap plan I was trying.
Another example would be Telekom. When in a train or car, I get placed into B20 usually. In this case I get some 25Mbps, so it's fine. BUT, in certain cities they have B7 where they run 20+20MHz LTE-A, and that usually gets me 130 - 150Mbps. Pretty damn big difference.
Oh, also not all settings in the selection you posted are valid. I think they're just what's in Android. My phone also lists "NR" for example, despite not supporting it.
Other than this menu, the same thing is controlled in Settings under "Preferred network type". Although this still gives more control.
Fun fact: Disable 2G option was only available since it seems Android 12, but via this hidden menu has been available for... probably all the time.
Effectively the same setting on my Android 2.3.6 phone:
So far i see no way to change band modes. The list i provided is the only thing to change anything network related (i turned off 5G using that list). If anything comes up later, you'll be the first one to know.
Hm. I can't figure this out at the moment, and my lack of knowledge regarding this doesn't help much either. I will come back to you if i find anything other than "allowing 2G" (or if i can't find anything at all)