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iansltx

S4GRU Staff Member
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Everything posted by iansltx

  1. Wait, third 10 MHz? All I'm seeing is people posting 100+90 MHz, which makes miles more sense, as n41 definitely has the 90 MHz channel width.
  2. SES has done n5 tests, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if AT&T eventually did B14 with them.
  3. They're asking for permission to deploy another shell closer to the earth's surface, so short answer is yes, this will get better over time, but you're not going to have cell sizes smaller than a terrestrial rural site, and you're not going to have capacity more than that 5x5 block, so in emergency areas the better option will be to get power to an existing site or COW and backhaul that site via Starlink, at like 30x the capacity.
  4. Splitting hairs, but sat capacity is fine. Issue is sat coverage area is rather large, and there's only a 5x5 LTE channel (likely at low modulation) worth of capacity to play with. The satellites themselves have tens of gigabits of capacity, but require a proper terminal to tap into that.
  5. IOT would be a decent use case, assuming it'd run on B26 LTE. As for replacing B71 LTE, if B26 phone support isn't a superset of 71, it's super close, with another bunch of phones that support 26 but not 71. Recall that 71 was tricky to add in at first due to antenna design issues, IIRC impacting phone size, so even now B26 is probably slightly more common than B71 on phones that aren't specifically made for T-Mobile. And then there are markets that have <= 15 Mz of 600 (e.g. here) where B71 has already been retired, so bringing B26 (back) online would represent a straight-up capacity increase, plus indoor strain relief for B12 when necessary on voice...'cuz we *still* don't have VoNR here.
  6. As mentioned on the other thread, this morning (IIRC 9:20a) T-Mobile dropped B41 here, adding the 40 MHz previously allocated to the n41 secondary carrier, bringing that to 80 MHz. Theoretically there's another 10 MHz here but B41 is completely offline from what I can tell so TBD if we'll ever see that.
  7. On the T-Mobile side of things, as of probably 9:20am this morning Austin is now 100+80 MHz n41; B41 is now gone. I can now hit 750ish Mbps indoors a half mile from the cell site, and wouldn't be surprised to break 1.5 Gbps closer/outside. So TMo now has 10x10 n25 + 15x15 n71 + 100+80 n41 here, for a total of 230 MHz 5G. With the C-Band they'll have 270. Re: 800, the band class is wrong for anything other than B26 LTE and n26 NR. Though I wouldn't be surprised if T-Mobile could throw Ericsson and Nokia enough cash to add band 26 support to their existing gear, so we *could* see B/n26 come back if there's nothing better to do with the spectrum. B26 probably makes more sense as that would allow for dropping B71 LTE everywhere with negligible coverage drops.
  8. Re: Dish, cable providers still exist. Comcast/Charter probably wouldn't mind instantly having a nationwide network to drastically improve their economics, and their existing agreement with VZW could be swapped to roaming, so a cable network SIM would suddenly have better coverage than any other carrier. Samsung is a vendor to both Dish and Charter/Comcast so n48 strand mount overlays in areas that need it could be deferred thanks to n70, but would integrate reasonably well with the Samsung macro gear. That, or Amazon buys.
  9. I'm definitely in the "this is still a big deal" camp, as e.g. where my parents are T-Mobile is still the only one with mid-band 5G. VZW doesn't even have 5G there. So going from 40 MHz n41 to...more than that...makes FWA tenable in a market where the existing options aren't great. Gonna check with family to see what channel width is live there now...
  10. I checked existing spectrum holdings and selling 5x5 PCS to each of VZW and AT&T in Kauai would get them to 20x20 apiece there, which should make them happy. In Maui it makes more sense to sell 5x5 each of PCS and AWS to get VZW 20x20 AWS and AT&T 15x15 PCS. I figure it would be a sale rather than a swap, as neither of the other two have spectrum T-Mobile would want that's high-frequency enough to avoid the spectrum screen. Honestly, T-Mobile is strong enough in Hawaii from a capacity perspective that cutting down PCS/AWS holdings won't hurt, particularly in exchange for finally unlocking 2.5 (though in Maui I saw 140 MHz n41 regularly in September if I remember correctly).
  11. Haven't swapped in the AT&T SIM, but I have my TMo SIM in right now and it's fine. Likewise my US Mobile VZW eSIM.
  12. So, best I can tell, swapping SIMs (Dish to AT&T) and rebooting with my S24 connected to my laptop (no adb connection or anything) corrupted things badly enough to "unauthorized factory reset" the device. Fortunately I had a full Samsung cloud backup from Monday morning (right before resetting/boxing up my S23; this screwiness happened last night), an incremental Google backup from Tuesday morning, and a lot of stuff synced to the cloud, so all I lost was on-device Signal messages (so Signal history is now limited to desktop/laptop, which means I'm missing a handful of messages from when I cut over from my S23 to S24, and if I fully unlink then that message history is gone), a little bit of WhatsApp, and some time. But hoo boy *that* was a fire drill. I would've been extra hosed if I wasn't near home/didn't have a recent full backup this would've been a ton more pain than it ended up being.
  13. Re: insurance, what I got was more like an extended warranty, with potentially quicker repairs by walking into a ubreakifix. I've had Pixels/Nexuses/Essential phones replaced due to charging port jankiness thanks to getting the added protection plan, so for the times I've gotten a plan like that (not always) I've come out ahead overall. Absolutely wouldn't pay $10+ per month for phone insurance though. Of note, I go caseless, so mechanical breakdown is more likely than someone using a case. But it's also been...15 years or more since I've cracked a phone screen?
  14. NR to LTE would a switch from native to roaming, so 100% chance the call drops. This isn't some sort of Republic Wireless bonded calling magic. Not gonna even bother testing it As for call symbols, easiest way is SignalCheck I think. But Dish is going to hold on super tightly to native if VoNR is set up in the market (and won't sit on native at all if VoNR isn't) so ..pretty easy to assume. Likewise SignalCheck is going to be easier to spot for roaming vs. native, as IIRC T-Mobile roaming does *not* throw up the triangle as I guess Dish's rates are cheap enough to not care. As with the hotspot, they don't throttle, so roaming data experience may be better than native if you're picking between n71 and CA n41. Only caveat is latency.
  15. I ordered a Boost Infinite SIM a few days back, as the S24 now supports n70, and is being sold directly by Boost, though eSIM is not yet available. Got a SIM via UPS last night...based on T-Mobile. Swung by a Boost store a few miles from me, was given a rainbow SIM, and activated it over the phone in the store. Data speeds vary significantly depending on whether you can get n66/n70, but with those two bands available I saw peaks of nearly 600 Mbps, with comparable latency to what I've had on Project Genesis. VoNR works fine, with 23.85 kbps AMR-WB used as the codec. Unfortunately neither Verizon nor T-Mobile have VoNR interconnection so all that extra voice bandwidth is going to waste. Roaming is on T-Mobile, with ~80ms latency to Dish speedtest servers in Dallas/Houston, including 5G of course (NSA). Roaming speeds are great, and on both native and roaming there's no video speed cap. I was able to manually select the network I was on, but AT&T didn't show up. We'll see whether I keep the service longer than a month since my Project Genesis line is better in every way except the whole "have to carry around two phones" part (due to the aforementioned lack of HD voice interconnection), but it'll be fun to play with on the drive between ABQ and AUS later this month. Hopefully they sell enough of the service to keep the lights on and buy B26, as having basically a CricKet/MetroPCS-like challenger come back ten years later is good for competition, and while the network is a ghost town it's handy for e.g. livestreaming video reliably in places n41/n77 aren't as reliable (e.g. far indoors) and WiFi is flakey.
  16. My S24 arrived while I was out of town on the 26th. Got back in town on the 29th and set it up, mostly, that day; Smart Switch over WiFi did most of the work, with some additional account sign-ins required. I also had to fiddle with Chrome a bit before Passkey notifications came through. I'm keeping my S23 until probably tomorrow to ensure I have everything I need off of it, but at this point I haven't needed to grab anything for a day or two so I think we're good. Re: storage upgrade, yeah, I'm on the standard S24, so 256 is the max, and that's plenty for my purposes (though 128 isn't unless I actually cleaned things up, so it's just as well that I got the double storage upgrade for free as it cost money on the S23 when I bought that phone). Re: warranty, I just got the damage option, not loss + theft + damage, as knock on wood loss/theft haven't been issues for my primary phone. Signal-wise, jury's out on whether T-Mobile connectivity is as good as on the S23, but VZW C-Band seems to be better. In theory my lower speeds on the S24 could've been due to other people hammering the network with *their* new S24s, as things seem to have gone back to normal now. Oh, and I now have one phone that can work on all four networks; I activated a Boost Infinite line last night and hit nearly 600 Mbps on n71 10x10 + n70 25x15 + n66 SDL 20 MHz. VZW/T-Mobile might've been faster at that particular location, but not by much.
  17. Ordered the S24 in orange, 256GB. $550 trade-in credit for my S23, and $24 for two years of Care+. That's as good as trade-ins are gonna get as far as I can figure, so no point waiting. The phone (finally) has n70 support too, so if Project Genesis gets retired or something, or Dish launches a pay per gig eSIM, I'll be able to use that on the same.phone finally.
  18. My setup has been a T-Mobile physical SIM and a secondary eSIM for the past bit (I also have a Boost pSIM but that gets used less). My secondary carrier of choice (on the same phone anyway) is US Mobile (VZW MVNO); their bottom tier unlimited plan has a decent amount of priority data and 5 GB of hotspot for $25/mo, and I can buy that a month at a time so if I'm just bouncing between areas where I don't need VZW for awhile I can let the line lapse and pick it up weeks later without losing the number. Unlocked eSIM is also nice for international roaming, as last year I swapped between an international eSIM from US Mobile and one from Airalo, as the two had different partner networks and IIRC I still couldn't actually pay for better intl data on T-Mobile (maybe it's changed with the T-Mobile plan migration). Even used an international physical SIM in a case or two, though having my T-Mobile SIM in the phone for free intl texting and low-speed proxied-through-the-US data was super useful.
  19. Don't know about leases, but back when Sprint did subsidies I traded my S20 in to Samsung for an S21 well before the contract was up. Phone was locked but Samsung didn't seem to care. A lease is different though of course, if it's indeed a lease.
  20. X75 (which I figure will show up in the S24, announced later this month) supports 5CA, which should be close enough. 245 MHz means 100+90 MHz TD n41, plus 55x55 FD. 20x20 in each of n66 and n25 gets you to 40, so the remaining channels would've been 10x10 (probably n66) and 5x5 (probably n25). So the 5CA -> 6CA bump is marginal in this case. A bigger deal would be 4+ CA over n41 + n41 + n77A + n77C, as that would get T-Mobile to 255 MHz TD in a number of areas (20 MHz DoD + 40 MHz C-Band) on 4CA, plus whatever they can pick up on n71/66/25 in that area (likely to hit 15-20 MHz consistently). Comparable speeds without expecting a super aggressive PCS/AWS refarm quite yet. Speaking of refarms, I've seen two n25 channels in a number of places recently. Atlanta has this IIRC, as do parts of NM, IL/MO. n66 is still MIA in most places, but 25+25+71+41+41 maxes out the S24, and being able to do something useful with 5x5 means small blocks of PCS that T-Mobile sometimes has won't just sit there unused, so I'll take that as a win.
  21. Source? Starlink Direct is going to run over B25 (G block) LTE. Literally any *Sprint* LTE phone and most T-Mobile ones would be able to connect.
  22. Given that they've barely mentioned n25 thusfar, not sure it would come up on the earnings calls? That refarm is continuing apace, with 20x20 n25 in a number of areas. I doubt they'll make much noise on refarming n66 as at this point improvements will be marginal. DoD/C-Band would be newsworthy though. I doubt they'll touch mmW in the next six months, as they still have 2.5 GHz to refarm in most areas, and with sufficient backhaul 100+90 MHz n41 plus 20x20 n25 that'll give you 2+ Gbps with a larger coverage footprint than mmW. C-Band and DoD overlays on top of that will give basically every site plenty of capacity runway. And they also have closure of FWA registrations as another lever for capacity. mmW is such a situational pick here that I think we'll continue to not see it.
  23. So, T-Mobile on Maui is pretty solid, with a few exceptions that are unsurprising. They have n71 20x20, n25 20x20, n41 100+40 (though I've only seen 3CA) in the central parts of the island. In Kahului, I found a site pretty close to the airport with better-than-gig backhaul. They also have 15x15 each of B2 and B66. The catch here is they lose signal a little earlier than AT&T in fringe areas, and in Hana the service is close to unusable (and n71 only for 5G), though in Hana basically everyone is iffy on service quality. But in areas where they have proper service, in the more populated areas, they have stronger signal and faster speeds by as much as an order of magnitude, thanks to C-Band not being available to VZW/AT&T here. AFAIK both of those two only have 10x10 n5 here for NR.
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