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Sprint & T-Mobile Roaming Agreement


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My phone is showing native coverage while connecting to a T-Mobile tower. I just did a software update on my Essential PH-1 this morning. Right after completing the update, it shows native full signal on T-Mobile AWS. 

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5 hours ago, dbsynergy said:

My phone is showing native coverage while connecting to a T-Mobile tower. I just did a software update on my Essential PH-1 this morning. Right after completing the update, it shows native full signal on T-Mobile AWS. 

 

 

My essential has done the same since last week, with feb update. honestly i could not remember if this was how it was before.  Glad you confirmed this.  Fwiw, it does the same on USCC roaming as well UNLESS voice / 1x is also roaming then the R will be displayed.

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On 2/19/2019 at 4:59 PM, dbsynergy said:

My phone is showing native coverage while connecting to a T-Mobile tower. I just did a software update on my Essential PH-1 this morning. Right after completing the update, it shows native full signal on T-Mobile AWS. 

vTIErP3

 

That's really interesting that it's showing the real T-Mobile PLMN instead of the Clear PLMN. Unless SCP replaces it automatically when displaying it.

On 2/19/2019 at 10:38 PM, swintec said:

My essential has done the same since last week, with feb update. honestly i could not remember if this was how it was before.  Glad you confirmed this.  Fwiw, it does the same on USCC roaming as well UNLESS voice / 1x is also roaming then the R will be displayed.

I believe this has always been the behavior on Android. The roaming indicator is the status of the CDMA connection only. 

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 1/29/2019 at 5:07 PM, ingenium said:

Perhaps T-Mobile or US Cellular is restricting the bands available, and not allowing carrier aggregation. It's also possible that T-Mobile or US Cellular is deprioritizing roaming on their congested sites, rather than Sprint throttling it. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if providers gave priority to their own customers over roaming UEs.

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk
 

The T-Mobile site in Centerville, IA can't possibly be congested, it was a old 2G only iWireless site, no one around here had iWireless or T-Mobile, I doubt anyone has switched since the tower was upgraded in December. And the US Cellular site I'm on most of the time couldn't possibly be congested from what can't be more than 400 cell phones most of which are non smartphones. This area has a huge older population compared to the population total overall, many holding on to their old flip phones to avoid being forced to upgrade to a smartphone. Plus I got a US Cellular device that was pulling nearly 30Mbps, versus my Sprint devices that initially peak around the same at the beginning of the speed test then drop down to 3Mbps. And it's not just this area, I traveled all over Iowa and Missouri this past month. And if I was roaming on US Cellular or T-Mobile I was throttled. Every tower in these extremely rural areas can't be congested. On US Cellular bands 12 and 5, and T-Mobile 4 and 2. All of them I've been throttled on, all over the place.

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I thought I'd share this interesting additional coverage courtesy of T-mobile LTE Band 2 coverage. I'm in a small town called Osage City, KS and just up until earlier this year did I have only barely any LTE coverage here but had ATT LTE and Verizon for voice coverage. 

Screenshot_20190315-135922_SignalCheck Pro.jpg

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  • 2 months later...

Sprint LTE/TMO AWS native (non-roaming-indicated) coverage confirmed in Oxford, OH.

Has anyone verified that active data sessions, including VoLTE and/or Calling+ will soft-handover to and from TMO AWS?

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53 minutes ago, Handyman said:

Has anyone verified that active data sessions, including VoLTE and/or Calling+ will soft-handover to and from TMO AWS?

The roaming agreement with T-Mobile includes LTE data only, not VoLTE.

Handover of a Calling Plus call is possible and has been documented, I believe. That being said, latency is often problematic as roaming traffic is always routed back through Sprint's network. 

VoLTE calls are trickier. They can be handed off to a similar-to-Calling-Plus data session on T-Mobile LTE, although they would face the same latency issue. I'm not sure if this has been documented yet. 

A side note: my iPhone 8 often drops to CDMA for a few seconds before kicking over to T-Mobile LTE, making a smooth handoff impossible, although I've witnessed iPhone X and newer devices transitioning directly from weak Sprint LTE to T-Mobile LTE. A handoff may be possible in these cases. 

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  • 1 month later...

When I first started getting T-Mobile roaming was in October/November when I upgraded phones. Initially it was great and it would pick up band 71 with good speed and I always had U.S. Cellular LTE before that. But now i never connect to band 71 anymore which was the only T-Mobile band I could pick up in this location and now I am stuck on a useless unusably slow U.S. Cellular 3g except at around 11 at night when it somewhat works. I never connect to U.S. Cellulars LTE ever anymore. Can anyone explain why they aren’t at least letting me roam on U.S. Cellulars LTE? Coverage map shows Extended LTE coverage still.

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Anyone else experience google search app not working saying its offline when roaming on Tmobile? Vacationing in Hawaii and roaming on tmo at rental house. Wifi fixes issue when available.

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

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17 hours ago, superbluepsd said:

Anyone else experience google search app not working saying its offline when roaming on Tmobile? Vacationing in Hawaii and roaming on tmo at rental house. Wifi fixes issue when available.

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk
 

Yeah, I get that whenever I'm roaming internationally. I just open up Chrome, go to google.com and then enter my search there. It always works. I don't understand why it always says offline when using the Google search app.

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