The 3G standard used by China Mobile (called TD-CDMA) is a homegrown (Chinese) standard. I guess they created it in order to avoid paying royalties to use an "international standard”, and/or because they have baked some "special" services into the standard to make it easier to the Chinese government to do its "job". You know what I mean, haha.
In any case, it is veeery unlikely (maybe even illegal considering the USA government recent bad relationship with Chinese technologies) that any cellular service provider in the States would use this standard. Ever.
Regarding changing frequencies, I am not a hacker or an engineer in the field of radio communications (I just read Anandtech.com articles on these topics from time to time, haha), so I have no idea if it is feasible from a technical (physical) point of view. However, even if it were possible (or needed, as it seems TDCDMA shares some frequency bands with WCDMA) I guess extensive modifications of the phone's OS and firmware would still be requiered, as the way to encode and send and receive signals in TDCDMA is just quite different to WCDMA. Probably, even some serious hardware hack would be in order. In a few words, as far as I know (that is not much, I have to admit) it's not worth the effort.
@ Marc_SP
Hey, you seem to know your stuff about this dedicated 3g network that CM uses. I bought recently a Lumia 920 through China Mobile. As you said it will only work with EDGE here in Europe. Is there any possible that there is some compatible 3g network in the States. Or (a stupid question) can the frequency be changed?
thanks
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