My Experience in British Colombia

[RAvirani]

Hi all,

 

I’m in Canada right now and my Sprint and AT&T phones are roaming on ROGERS while my T-Mobile phone is roaming on TELUS. After spending a few days in BC, I have to say that TELUS completely blows ROGERS out of the water as far as rural coverage goes. TELUS’s rural network in BC is surprisingly similar to Sprint’s - 5x5 850 B5 (850), 15x15 B2 (1900) and 20x20 B4 (2100). The Qrxlevmin on all bands in -128. ROGERS is running 5x5 B12 (700a), 5x5 B17 (700b), 5x5 B5 (850), 20x20 B4 (2100) and 20x20 B7 (2600).

 

It seems that the two providers have similar site density although TELUS has done a much better job of optimizing their network. I don’t think I’ve dropped LTE once on TELUS whereas I find myself on 3G/E probably a third of the time on ROGERS. Also, it seems that ROGERS LTE gives up at much higher signal levels than TELUS LTE. TELUS has no problem maintaining a -126 or -127 LTE connection while ROGERS LTE often drops off close to -122, despite them having much more spectrum on air than TELUS.

 

The most impressive thing I have noticed on TELUS in my few days of using them is that their 5x5 B5 LTE carrier performs well even at signal levels as low as -128. Today I was able to hold a facetime call without any issues as I passed through a number of patches where TELUS’s B5 LTE carrier’s RSRP was hovering between -123 and -128. I think the reason for this is because TELUS is very aggressive about pushing users up to higher band spectrum - I oftentimes see my phone jump from -110ish B5 to -120ish B2.

 

Overall, I’ve been very impressed with my experience with TELUS thus far and slightly let down by ROGERS. I hope to see Sprint follow in TELUS’s footsteps as far as network management goes - with a little more 1900 LTE on air, I think Sprint can build a network that works similarly to TELUS’s. Stretch 800 and 1900 to their max, drop the Qrxlevmin values on all bands and be a little more aggressive about shifting users to mid/highband spectrum and I think Sprint could do some pretty great things, just like TELUS has .

[NGeorge]

On 7/23/2017 at 10:56 PM, RAvirani said:

Overall, I’ve been very impressed with my experience with TELUS thus far and slightly let down by ROGERS. I hope to see Sprint follow in TELUS’s footsteps as far as network management goes - with a little more 1900 LTE on air, I think Sprint can build a network that works similarly to TELUS’s. Stretch 800 and 1900 to their max, drop the Qrxlevmin values on all bands and be a little more aggressive about shifting users to mid/highband spectrum and I think Sprint could do some pretty great things, just like TELUS has .

2

Just an update -- in the last 6 - 8 months, Sprint has added Bell, Telus, ICE and Sasktel as roaming partners in Canada (it's on their partners page as well). I go to BC every few months, and while it still defaults to Rogers as primary, I was able to connect to both Bell and Telus; the speeds were slightly slower than Rogers. I noticed that it tends to prefer Bell to Telus when I've been in areas where Rogers has weak coverage... that said, with all 4 networks, you should have coverage pretty much everywhere up there.

N