MacPCS

They don't. I care not if they split up the device from the service. It makes me no difference. I would have just liked to see a more aggressive price on the service is all. An actual price war that makes customers take a serious look at Sprint.

That's my point exactly. It's not disruptive and it's not a huge advantage for Sprint. It's status quo. That in itself is a problem and the only thing I wish they would have been more aggressive about pricing trying to steal customers because as the boss knows, the network won't steal any customers right now with the perception being putrid. The plans aren't bad - if you like sprint. If you dislike sprint they won't make you really look twice unless you want unlimited. I think that's already been the case though.

I'm not sure this is anywhere near aggressive enough to convince people to switch to Sprint. I mean you still have to pay for the device, which isn't trivial. So we are at what, 80 bucks a month? That doesn't seem at all disruptive, just more status quo most people don't need unlimited. Or even 2GB. Power users like us here probably do, but to most of the population they just want their bill to be cheaper, their service to work and have the device they want. Sprint needs to do better to convince people to join the "Pardon our dust" Network. Because that's the perception. A slight at best price advantage won't do it.

I'm actually excited they won't have to suffer the distraction of T-Mo integration. I'd rather they go after USCC if they just have to eat a large company.

The good news is low expectations can lead to out performing expectations more easily. That being said, nobody will care who is on another carrier until they are convinced sprint has it's network fixed. It'll take 800 and spark deployments to be far and wide before that tide seriously turns. Good news though is that they're putting in the effort. Sprints problem is perception. I have coworkers that absolutely hate sprint and won't recommend it due to past experiences despite my insistence that this isn't your grandpas network anymore and is only getting better.

I had lots of issues with blocked calls on Sunday both making and receiving but that was fixed by mid afternoon. It was bad all morning though and I have exceptional voice service here normally. Not sure at all that it's related but I definitely noticed it.

Don't be sad. Sprint expects 800 voice deployment to be largely complete in the first half of this year, for the entire network. They even expect very good progress on LTE on 800Mhz as well by the halfway point of calendar 2014. All of this was stated yesterday AM on the quarterly earnings call.

thats nothing you shouldn't have already expected. 800 will have to be largely complete before people nationally start to even think sprint has good coverage. Spark will have to be a reality in a lot of places before people take them seriously in terms of speeds. And then they need lots of devices that support all three bands and don't have fallback issues due to the network vision changeover. Yes, that's going to take at the minimum a year. Closer to two for sure.

QuikTrip > *

screen replacement is 150 on a 5, and can't be done on anything else newer than a 3GS yet. But that's if you don't have AppleCare and it is caused by physical damage. I'd say if you have a iPhone, get AppleCare +. 79 for a new phone beats the shit out of 269 which is the out of warranty cost for a 5, 5c or 5s. If you just have a defect in the first year though, it's a free replacement obviously.

They will eventually move away, it'll just be a looooong time. Think 2025 or so. They just don't have a need to. CDMA is just a good solid voice fallback even when they go VoLTE for all the old handsets. It will be a couple years before VoLTE is even a thing on Sprint and then they can begin to plan the shutdown. Which will not have a lot of urgency as 1xAdvanxef is so spectrally efficient it costs next to nothing in terms of spectrum to maintain. EV-DO on the other hand...

. What's your point? In the context of his issue this doesn't make any sense to me.

vzw had very different objectives with their LTE deployment than sprint does. They just wanted to blanket the country with coverage first and worry about capacity later. They used 700 MHz first and are going back with AWS I believe and strengthening their capacity. It was a pretty straightforward network overlay rather than what Sprint is doing... Sprint OTOH is rebuilding their entire network. Piece by piece, site by site. Not specifically targeting coverage as much as just trying to get it done.

doesn't mean his points are without merit. Some might be overblown but the idea of sprint and t mobile merging will have loads of questions that need to be answered to be able to say yeah it's a great idea. Or that it's a terrible idea for that matter.

I'd much rather them purchase US Cellular or C-Spire or nTelos. or just some of the PCS spectrum assets (and maybe take the customers) from T-Mo/MetroPCS similar to how they did the recent deal with US Cellular. I'd prefer to not have Sprint not be forced to swallow all of T-Mobile. That's asking quite a lot financially, and would take a lot of resources away from Network Vision which really is the foundation of Sprint's future at this point and they should be laser focused on executing that as expeditiously as possible.