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The Sprint executive at the press conference is unfortunately not a very good public speaker, and was disappointingly vague with technical details. However, I think we can reasonably infer that "LTE-Advanced" at the very least means a 2nd B41 carrier is beginning to be deployed (old news to local Premiers ), but we can hope this announcement actually covers much more than that, including SON-related software enhancements, small cells, and of course even more B41 carriers. Would be great to find a number to these folks.

If they were on the verge of changing the logo, I don't think they'd use it so prominently in the Twitter pic announcing the event, but we'll see. First official market for B41 CA and/or VoLTE would sure be nice. With B25+26 on nearly every site, and the Ocean builds to plug the remaining gaps, a good experience with the latter should be doable. Wishful thinking, I know.

M9 should be out in a couple weeks (likely the 25th), which should be accompanied by a nice price drop on the M8.

That is an excellent price! I wonder if they're attempting to clear stock for a Crystal X launch... Considering this is only a few dollars more than what she paid awhile back for her M400 flip phone, this could be what it takes to convince my mother to try a smartphone full-time, although the reports of a quiet earpiece have me a bit concerned. I'd also be able to borrow it to look for B26+41 during tower-spotting trips. However, since her line is with Ting, the process to get there may be more trouble than it's worth. If it's true that stores won't match this price, I'd have to: 1.) Order online and wait for delivery. 2.) Activate on my Sprint line 3.) Go to store and pay off Easy Pay balance. 4.) Swap S4 back onto line. 5.) Call Ting to activate; cross fingers FEC clears.. or if not, wait however long it takes for Sprint & Ting to work that out. Does that sound about right? It'd be nice to be able to just go to a store and leave without having to attach service, but that would make too much sense. As an aside, assuming they're at least breaking even at this price, Sprint should be aggressively marketing this deal both to new customers and current customers that have a non-Spark device as a means to offload 3G and B25 to the other bands, especially since it's an RF champ.

In addition to the rough start with processing unlock requests, there are definitely a lot of issues right now with that new "financial eligibility check"- the number of what I hope are false positives (and not an intentional block) is creating massive headaches both in the Sprint IT department and the customer service departments of their MVNO's, who have been given few answers to pass along to customers. There is no reason why an S4 originally purchased *from Ting* (at full price, of course), and subsequently moved to a Sprint postpaid line, should be failing this FEC. If I want to activate that phone on my line with Ting or another MVNO, I should be allowed to do so, regardless of whether I'm currently making payments on another device or am even late on a payment for service (I'm not on either count, for the record). Rolling this system out overnight without a trial period, or at least an easy way to override obvious errors, has damaged what was a very healthy relationship between Sprint and their MVNO's, and I hope Sprint is moving seriously and expeditiously towards a fix.

$46.05 to Sprint ($55 base MRC + $20 unlimited data add-on - $30 Framily discount - $2 NVP 10% + $0.66 USF fee + $1.99 Administrative charge + $0.40 Regulatory charge) + $3.43 in tax = $49.48/mo. For a single line w/ unlimited data, short of finding someone willing to sell their SERO-P account, or a better employer discount, I don't really think you can beat that. My mother, who is sticking with a flip phone for now, uses no mobile data and usually <100 minutes per month. So her line's with Ting, with a typical bill of about $11.55 ($6 base + $3 100 min + $2.55 taxes & fees). My Framily does still have one free spot though in case she surprises me one day and gets a smartphone and wants data.

The PCS RRU's Sprint purchased from Samsung for NV were indeed "recycled" models from previous projects. Before the vendors for NV were first announced back in December 2010, C Spire (née Cellular South) and MetroPCS had already announced deals with Samsung to upgrade their networks to LTE. Prior to this, Samsung had not won any major domestic contracts. As a new entrant, they would be designing new radios from scratch for them. For MetroPCS, which held licenses in the PCS C/F blocks in California, their aim was to maximize coverage from each site, which required pushing them all to max power. Therefore, the radios were tuned for the A and B blocks, which minimized distortions by weakening the max power in C/F. C Spire also requested this same A/B block differential tuning, but for different reasons. In areas where they had obtained the A block from their spectrum swap with T-Mobile, having radios that performed more strongly with those frequencies made more sense in a more traditional network that is designed with sites operating at varied power. However, they would later back out of this deal and switch to Alcatel-Lucent. So when Sprint came along shortly thereafter, by grabbing these already tested designs from off the shelf, so to speak, they were able to move on to deployment relatively quickly. So that is why the second B25 carrier in Chicago (located toward the top of Sprint's B block disaggregation) has this small but consistent propagation advantage compared to the G block carrier, and probably won't in ALU or Ericsson markets. I had originally believed that Ericsson was to blame for yet another wonky optimization job, but for once it seems they're in the clear. The boost in both capacity and coverage provided by this second B25 carrier in my primary market has definitely made a difference in some locations. For example, LTE now works reliably in my basement (it was hit-or-miss @ ~-114 dBm before). When I'm out on the road and happen to be halfway between two towers, any "3G zones" have shrunk enough that I'm back on LTE at least a minute earlier than before (with the scan timer set to 1 minute, it's more likely to catch a signal on the first rather than second attempt). A further gain from B26 is still needed to cover some more ground, particularly indoors, but every little bit really does help. Between this and the off-loading to B41 by all those who either don't mind or even realize their phones lack SVLTE, it has made the wait for a confirmed VoLTE-capable Sprint device much more bearable. The fact that any Class II filings were submitted at all I think shows that Sprint has at least considered the idea of introducing wider B25 carriers in at least a few markets. If they do eventually decide to do so, I'm sure it wouldn't be too challenging to push out new firmware if that is the only change. Though I do wonder if they would explicitly note that in the changelog.

Yes. Sprint smartphones have included GSM & W-CDMA radios for a few years now for international roaming, since most of the rest of the world doesn't use CDMA. If it is a domestic GSM network you wish to use the phone with, Sprint's international-only unlock would not be sufficient (domestic MCC-MNC's would continue to be blacklisted within the phone), and you'd have to resort to combing through the XDA forums for a reliable method to make it fully unlocked.

Hopefully they will get the thresholds right for B25/26 to B41 VoLTE handover, so that the prioritization of FDD is correctly overridden. Given that B25+41 small cells are not yet available, and Clearwire conversions in many Samsung markets are not yet on the agenda, there will ironically continue to be many areas for the foreseeable future where only B41 offers a reliable data connection. I thought that all of the Samsung devices that had been previously limited to 5MHz FDD had received Class II permissive changes to support wider bandwidths in B25, all the way up to 20 MHz. They were the trouble brand in that regard from what I can recall, so what other legacy devices would be left that would need the G block carrier to remain @ 5 MHz? That said, licensing is indeed an equal or even greater obstacle, since Sprint doesn't hold the C block in most markets, nor of course the "H block." Chicago is one such market, however, where they should have enough PCS spectrum to add a third 5x5, or widen the existing B block carrier to 10x10, without impacting CDMA services, if they so chose. Are you saying that PCC/SCC assignment can be switched as seamlessly as a standard band-to-band handover? If so, would it be feasible to also implement the same sort of configuration where B25 downlink is paired with B26 uplink for the purpose of relieving the burden on the B26 downlink, of course done only when B25 signal is weak? I'm curious how complicated such a setup might get in Samsung markets where the second PCS carrier is often noticeably stronger (~4-5 dB) than the original G block one. That may confuse whatever software is responsible for the PCC/SCC switch. Upgrading B25 to 4T4R may be the simpler and perhaps superior solution.

Perhaps in the meantime they can be manually enabled? My S4 is currently un-rooted and can access those screens. I'm also still able to do other things like flash PRL's without root. That said, my phone's always been a bit of an odd beast. It was originally a PLBL (wholesale) model, which has the benefit of having no carrier branding or bloatware, but unfortunately (perhaps consequently) certain apps like Sprint Zone & Sensorly don't work correctly I've also played with some newer Samsung phones like the S5 & Note 4 at the Sprint store, and I'm pretty sure that ##DEBUG# at least worked on those, so it may vary from device to device.

It's nice to see that they don't price gouge this option like Comcast does. Note: That price doesn't include their business gateway that you are required to lease @ $10+/mo if you're using a static IP.

That would be adequate if all they were looking to do is build a skeleton network (à la T-Mobile in Omaha/Lincoln) and make some financial sense if they had absolutely zero sites licensed to start with. However, with the ~130 Chinook sites already in hand, and another 100+ planned (although we don't know yet if those additional sites will all be located within Montana, or also cover parts of WY & the Dakotas), I had the impression (even before Project Cedar was leaked) that Sprint aims to have the network at a high enough quality at launch so that it can be marketed locally to compete with and attract customers away from the duopoly, rather than being solely for license protection and existing subs passing through. One site per city would not be sufficient to meet the subsequent demand. If the new network is able to provide good coverage within the top 7 cities that have at least 20K POPs (Billings, Missoula, Great Falls, Bozeman, Butte, Helena, and Kalispell), all the highways between them, and the interstates at launch, then they should do very well. As a new entrant, having a neutral brand image will certainly help.

True. With two B41 carriers active, sites there are more likely to have backhaul that is actually fast enough to support the full capacity of the airlink(s).

Samsung's 8T8R FIT was in Rockford, so Sprint was already tied for first there according to RM's previous report from August. The most notable change was T-Mobile dropping out of the four-way tie for first place, due to their drop in call performance. Perhaps there are some bugs with eSRVCC (VoLTE to 2G/3G handover) that have cropped up.

CDMA BC10 (800 MHz) isn't mentioned, but if they plan to bring it to Sprint, it's probably safe to assume that's supported. The omission of TD-LTE is interesting. If they've managed to maintain SVLTE as a result, I'd find this device even more intriguing.. but if they've gone with eCSFB w/o B41, they can keep it.