Italian carriers use UMTS bands 1 and 8, LTE bands 3, 7 and 20. UMTS band 8, LTE bands 3 and 20 are in neither of your two phones. UMTS band 1 is in both, but LTE band 7 is not in your Z10, but it is in your Z30.
If you want LTE, TIM and Vodafone are your options.
I took STA100-5 to Greece for a week in March. Only had H or 3G. Neither Vodafone or Wind was using band 7 where I was.
Maybe next year it will be different, but 7 wasn't in use by itself in Athens.
What I never understood is why they don't just turn on every frequency at once in the device. This smacks of DVD regions to try and force the consumer to not be able to use their media in other places. The reason I say this is because an antenna is an antenna. It's a wire.
Dwaynie, take the Z30. You can pop an Italian prepaid sim into it. The Z10 you cannot because it is locked. If you use your Rogers account in Italy I will read about you in the newspaper later.
During October 2014, I used my unlocked, AT&T-branded Z10STL100-3 in Italy, Sicily, Croatia, and Montenegro. I used a third-party, "international roaming" SIM for talk, text and data. Whenever possible, I used local, free Wi-Fi for data. The SIM did not support LTE, but I was satisfied with the services that it did support.
I used the 3rd-party SIM because it provided cheaper roaming service than any AT&T international plan that was available at the time.
I took STA100-5 to Greece for a week in March. Only had H or 3G. Neither Vodafone or Wind was using band 7 where I was.
Maybe next year it will be different, but 7 wasn't in use by itself in Athens.
What I never understood is why they don't just turn on every frequency at once in the device. This smacks of DVD regions to try and force the consumer to not be able to use their media in other places. The reason I say this is because an antenna is an antenna. It's a wire.
Radio spectrum management really is the issue. There's high band spectrum, low band spectrum. FD-LTE networks, TD-LTE networks. So the end user has to be careful and buy the proper phones, or else he/she will be screwed.
But you know who doesn't get screwed? Carriers. Fragmentation actually benefits them because it decreases the possibility of phones previously purchased elsewhere working on their network. OEMs may help out a bit by making their phone models regional (like ROW vs. NA models) or consolidating the models they put out (like the Passport,) versus carrier-specific (which Samsung notoriously does) but in the end, that's still effort the customer has to expend to make sure they're getting the right phone, since there's no "one model fits all." But less of a hassle is buying is directly from your carrier--which most people do. And while doing this may not necessarily make money for the carriers in terms of hardware device sales, it sure helps keep customers around if they have to pay you $25 per month for 24 months, or spend $600 at the next carrier to get a compatible phone.
Anyway, TL;DR: the phone owner/traveler should do his/her research. In this case, the Z30 is a better option because it has two of Italy's high speed bands vs. just one in the Z10.
I took STA100-5 to Greece for a week in March. Only had H or 3G. Neither Vodafone or Wind was using band 7 where I was.
Maybe next year it will be different, but 7 wasn't in use by itself in Athens.
WIND in Greece still may not even have a b7 LTE network, just a b3 network. Vodafone has both, but as you figured out, maybe they don't have b7 coverage in Athens. B3 is lower band spectrum compared to b7 which makes it more desirable between the two because it will provide better building penetration and coverage over area. B7 network will be faster, but **** for area covered and penetration.