S7 active on T-Mobile?

v0id · July 11, 2018

Just as the title says, anyone have any experience with this? I'm coming from AT&T and wanting to switch to a different network, and thought T-Mobile might be a good one to try out. I already don't like Verizon and my phone isn't compatible anyway, and the other smaller ones (Cricket, Straight Talk, Boost, Sprint, etc) don't appeal to me much. My problem is that I'm being told my phone was an AT&T exclusive and was only programmed to work on their network, despite it being a GSM phone and T-Mobile being a GSM carrier. And there was something about certain bands being disabled on the S7 active on purpose? I have a very limited knowledge in this area and only know a couple things so wanted to reach out to someone smarter than myself. Would it be as simple as swapping SIMs or is AT&T just bullshitting me so I don't leave?

Also general rants and opinions on T-Mobile as a carrier, since if I do want to switch I wanna know what I'm getting into. Thanks!

PS - For the record, I did try Google and got very mixed answers from Reddit and the Samsung forums so I'm trying to broaden my horizon by asking here.

PPS - To the mods, sorry if this is in the wrong category; I saw phones and figured this was my best shot

AndreiArgeanu · July 26, 2018

Well as long as the phone is not locked to the network than you are everything should be fine as the Samsung Galaxy S7 Active is not exclusive, it's just a consumer product just like the S7 edge. Everything should work fine and it's all just bullshit as the S7 Active is GSM and you claim that you want to switch to another GSM service so everything should be fine, if the network was CDMA like Verizon then you couldn't switch. If you really want to make sure you can try a pay as you go sim before to see if it works but it must work anyway. Hope it helped.

v0id · July 26, 2018

14 hours ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

Well as long as the phone is not locked to the network than you are everything should be fine as the Samsung Galaxy S7 Active is not exclusive, it's just a consumer product just like the S7 edge. Everything should work fine and it's all just bullshit as the S7 Active is GSM and you claim that you want to switch to another GSM service so everything should be fine, if the network was CDMA like Verizon then you couldn't switch. If you really want to make sure you can try a pay as you go sim before to see if it works but it must work anyway. Hope it helped.

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I figured as long as its GSM it should work just fine, but some of my research points to the fact that not all the bands that T-Mobile uses are available to the S7 active. For example, I went over to phonearena.com to look at what bands the phone supports. I then looked up a chart of the bands that T-Mobile uses for its 2G, 3G and 4G LTE coverage. The phone has all but two, which the description says are just extension bands, whatever that means. So I'm just not sure if that is really necessary for decent coverage. I'm way outta my league here when it comes to cell phone tech, so that's why I'm reaching out. Thanks though!