David Mackler

As one of those people, I pay $5 more per month for unlimited than for the 2GB data plan. In practice, that $5 would buy only another half GB. I keep running the numbers on the new plans, but the old grandfathered plan we have is still the most affordable option, at about $135/month for five lines, two of them iPhones, with corporate discounts. Truth be told, I am on WiFi most of the day at home and at work, and rarely ever hit even 2GB most months. So why do I keep unlimited? For times when I travel heavily and do rely on cellular, I have the option without overage charges, to use more than my average. Second, with web pages and apps become more data heavy, I see it as insurance that I won't have to pay significantly *more* per month than I do now as monthly usage climbs.

True, but if the choice is between pulling funds out of a good investment to pay for a car -- and I wouldn't leave them sitting in a savings account with piddling interest rates -- or pulling out only a down payment and taking a sub-3% loan, the latter makes sense to me. In fact, that is what I just did a couple weeks ago when we replaced our 12 year old car. Paying cash is my preference generally, and I use my credit card sparsely and mainly for convenience, but I do consider the options in front of me each time.

I wouldn't worry about leaving it plugged in. California passed a law that requires either (a) smart chargers that stop drawing power when the battery is fully charged or (-b-) a message to the owner asking to unplug the charger. In either case, the point is to stop the "vampire" power draw from the wall outlet. As usual, it is easier for a manufacturer to simply adopt that across the product line rather than producing a special version just for sale in the one state. The message you are seeing is specifically related to that. Given that you have it connected to the router, it is plugged in to keep it operating, not simply to top off the charge. All that said, batteries do need to be used periodically to stay healthy. Call it exercise, if you like.

True enough, thanks for the reminder. I use OpenDNS for our home network, and that has a sticky "dynamic" IP. I have it set on the router so it covers all of our devices without needing to configure any of them.

They do by default, but RFC standard behavior can be restored with a check box. I have checked that box for my household.

You would need something like multicast to carry the live programming to many subscribers within a finite amount of spectrum. On demand, such as Netflix, would still be unicast and certainly unable to scale to the number of customers needed to make the programming fees reasonable. Those who are more knowledgeable with RF may be able to provide more meaningful insight, but I would expect that it would need a very large number of picocells in a neighborhood to make this work. To take this to an extreme, If you think of the new sports stadiums, they blanket the area with hundreds (thousands?) of low power wifi access points to provide the density to stream all of that video. It wouldn't be to that extent as neighborhoods are less dense, of course, but the problems are similar.

We seem to be presuming this WiFi/LTE is akin to CA, with both fully loaded concurrently. That may be so, and it may also be Multi-path TCP. Wikipedia says it better than I could: Multipath TCP is particularly useful in the context of wireless networks [1] - using both Wi-Fi and a mobile network is a typical use case. In addition to the gains in throughput from inverse multiplexing, links may be added or dropped as the user moves in or out of coverage without disrupting the end-to-end TCP connection. The problem of link handover is thus solved by abstraction in the transport layer, without any special mechanisms at the network or link level. Handover functionality can then be implemented at the endpoints without requiring special functionality in the subnetworks - in accordance to the Internet's end-to-end principle. If that were indeed the case, the impact to the macro network would be negligible, whereas the user experience transiting between cellular and WiFi would be a big win for Sprint (and its users). At this point it does not seem we have enough information to definitively say either way.

Hmmm. Could the simultaneous WiFi and LTE be Multi-Path TCP? That preserves a smooth user experience, even when transitioning between WiFi and LTE signal areas (going into a basement or walking out of a Starbucks) that would otherwise tend to inspire a few choice curse words.

And I did receive a reply from that address: Regretfully this mailbox can provide you no answers on Sprint PCS wireless schedule as the team's members are engineers supporting IPv6 on our commercial router networks and are not privy to PCS wireless solution deployment planning. I took a quick look at the sprint.com web site and for the content I could find there, it was in reference to IPv6 deployment on our Internet, MPLS and Peerless IP router networks. Sprint is completing MPLS IPv6 launch this year which would insure that networks our wireless network uses are supporting IPv6, and ready for PCS IPv6 future plans.

You did inspire me to send a note to that address. We shall see if that helps, but every vote counts.

Yes, I have this deal too. I am mostly on WiFi, and also have a Zing, so I only use about half of that 200MB in a typical month. My other inspiration was curiosity, to see the level of TMo coverage in the areas I frequent. It is always nice to have first-hand experience over coverage maps and hearsay.

My Zing just pulled down the update. I had the same SIM card message, also solved by a reboot. I am perplexed by the Spark logo. It lights up on band 25. AFAICT, it is just an ordinary LTE signal. No CA, not even band 41. Not sure what it tells me that the "LTE" indicator doesn't already. What am I missing?

Current: 2009 Shelby GT500 (bought it 18 months old on a deal I couldn't resist) Dream: oh, too many to name. Let's start with an original 289 Cobra

True enough Robert, and that is exactly why my home U-Verse at 18 Mbps is plenty fast for anything I do at home. That said, there are certainly exceptions. I work for a large tech company in Silicon Valley, and the speed at my work laptop is limited by the gig ethernet wire speed. Software updates from Microsoft and Apple, as two examples, are able to saturate my ethernet connection. Granted, not many can sites can sustain that today. As Google fiber and the competitive response to Google fiber increase our bandwidth, more and more (generally powered by Akamai or other network edge CDNs for now) downloads will be able to saturate that speed. So yes, your calculation of the odds is spot on for today, but our experiences and then our expectations will continue to rise.

Just picked up band 41 on my Zing for the first time ever today. This was North San Jose (or perhaps Santa Clara, never sure where the city line is) on N. First between Tasman and Montague/San Tomas. I was driving in traffic, so didn't have time or attention for a speed test. Still, that is impressive. FWIW, that area has good WiMax coverage, so plenty of (former) Clearwire sites all around.