Forcing Band 3 for Rakuten Mobile on Android?

Anyone have any luck with this? Is it possible on a Samsung Galaxy 22 Ultra (not officially supported, but seems to work fine)?

I’m in Iwate and live close enough to the station that I’m well within the Rakuten area. However, it always says I’m connected to a partner line.

Turning on/off airplane mode works for all of 10 seconds.

I heard there used to be an app that no longer works.
I can dial *#2263# and get to the band selection screen but I have no idea what to do from there or how I would reverse it when I need to.

There no convinient “band 3” option. There’s an LTE 1 2 3 4 5 etc option, but I read LTE 3 is in the Mhz range, nowhere near band 3’s frequency of 1.7Ghz.

2 comments
  1. I’m not sure what you’re asking. Rakuten is an MNVO. They don’t own the network they buy large blocks of data/voice at a discount then sell it to individual users. So of course you’re connected to a partner, because there is no Rakuten to connect to.

    For instance in using BMobile, but, they buy their service from Docomo so that’s the network I’m connected to.

  2. Had the same issue on my wife’s mum’s phone. The phone switched from Band 3 to Band 8 (IIRC) automatically but there was nothing on Band 8 in her area. I used the same code as you have and then I think somewhere there is a Automatic/Europe setting. If I recall correctly in Europe you can select Band 3. Reverting is just selecting Auto again although I recently changed her SIM and this had already happened when I checked. Hope this helps – did this last year and haven’t touched it since so you may have to dig around.

    Edit: LTE Band 3 is exactly what you need. Sounds like you found it already.

    Edit2: We ditched Rakuten after the cancellation of the free tier and they removed her 5000 points without warning. Pretty crap IMHO.

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