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Sprint Roaming Experience


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I'm in an Sprint Roaming Alliance area quite a bit and while it acts like Native Sprint coverage, with even better speeds sometimes in excess of 2 Mbit, the battery life is attrocious with being able to drain the battery twice as fact as in normal coverage since it is roaming.

 

Yes and no. Technically, it is not roaming. Sprint Rural Alliance coverage is tagged as native in the PRL. However, it is set at slightly lower priority than Sprint corporate coverage. So, no, your handset is not roaming. But, yes, it will still periodically search for Sprint corporate SIDs because they are set at higher priority.

 

In short, unless your handset is on a SID set at the highest priority level in the PRL, your handset will always periodically search for a higher priority SID, roaming or not. And if I misconstrued any important details here, I am sure that digiblur will chime in to clarify.

 

AJ

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I haven't looked at all Rural Alliance partners but I remember looking at Carolina Wireless when it was enabled. They were actually the same priority as the other native SIDs in the one geographic area of the PRL, but they were last scanned. In a sense they were less priority. Let me see if I can explain:

 

Fly to that area of Carolina Wireless and turn on your phone. First it scans the previous Geo you were in before shutting your phone off. It gives up then starts from the top of the file. It will scan on down onto Atlanta, then Charlotte, then Carolina West 1522 850mhz, then Carolina West PCS before moving to roaming. If you do find Carolina West(1522) then your phone is happy. It's on the highest priority in that geo. There's no dying need to actively scan for something better. I believe there is some sort of check during a "sleep/idle" period I believe but nothing crazy. Now move out of the area and pick up roaming signal in the same geo and now your phone will actively look for something better when the baseband has idle cycles. It uses more power since the radio isn't sleeping. It will continue to look for those Atlanta, then Charlotte, then Carolina west combinations above.

 

Sprint's 800SMR areas are designed like this as well. Fly into Chicago and turn on your phone. Your phone will scan 800SMR then the PCS SID. If it lands on the PCS SID due to no 800SMR it won't actively scan for 800SMR all the time. It could at a later sleep cycle period find it though.

 

I did find by setting the 800SMR to an actually higher priority and not just a first scan it doesn't use the battery up that much more than if it wasn't. So there must be another timer/setting when roaming that it is VERY aggressive when in a roaming area. I'd say too aggressive but it does save them money. But then you look at all the iPhone5's, Note2's, PhotonQ's that could have 800SMR enabled to cut down on roaming in several areas of the US where 800SMR is active...and simply scratch your head. Is there an issue with 800SMR on one of the phones? Hmm....

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I haven't looked at all Rural Alliance partners but I remember looking at Carolina Wireless when it was enabled. They were actually the same priority as the other native SIDs in the one geographic area of the PRL, but they were last scanned. In a sense they were less priority.

 

In that case, the issue could be signal strength. Some of the Sprint Rural Alliance partners have better networks than others do. If site density is light, such that signal is frequently marginal, then signal may often drop below the threshold that triggers a rescan of the PRL.

 

AJ

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My signal strength is generally very high. Call quality is actually pretty bad. Data speeds in this part of KY on the Sprint Roaming Alliance are some of the best you could see. During the day I can generally average 1 Mbps. After 10 PM it isn't rare to get 2 - 2.5 Mbps. But I do notice driving around the small town my profile will randomly update itself, or it may be a PRL rescan as AJ said.

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So that brings up an interesting question/point about 800SMR. If a device latches onto PCS first, and you're in an area which has 1xA deployed on 800, the only time your phone will pick up the signal is if the PCS signal reaches a certain threshold, correct?

 

In those areas where 1xA is actively being deployed on the SMR band, is it voice only or data as well?

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In that case, the issue could be signal strength. Some of the Sprint Rural Alliance partners have better networks than others do. If site density is light, such that signal is frequently marginal, then signal may often drop below the threshold that triggers a rescan of the PRL.

 

AJ

 

Nex-Tech in Western KS has a better network in terms of coverage around here. They are now expanding into native Sprint land in Salina and McPherson so be interesting to see what happens.

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  • 3 weeks later...

This thread has cleared up a bit of confusion for me. I was in zip code 49887 today. The closest native sprint coverage is over 20 miles away there so obviously I was roaming. I was streaming pandora while driving and stopped to google something. I figured it would take forever being that I would be roaming on 1x and wasnt going to bother to kill pandora. To my amazement the webpage loaded instantly. So then I decided to run a speed test and pulled dowm just over 2 Mb. This is where I was confused because to my understanding 1x is not capable of that. After reading this thread my assumption is that my prl must allow me to roam 3g in this area

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This thread has cleared up a bit of confusion for me. I was in zip code 49887 today. The closest native sprint coverage is over 20 miles away there so obviously I was roaming. I was streaming pandora while driving and stopped to google something.

 

If you do a lot of roaming, be careful with your streaming, as even streaming over CDMA1X can easily transfer 15-60 MB per hour. And that can eat fairly quickly into the 300 MB per month roaming quota.

 

AJ

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Even stock prls there is 3g roaming. I found I could even roam on VZW in North LA with a standard PRL.

 

Sent from my little Note2

 

 

Are u finding 3g roaming on stock prl's outside of the 3g roaming areas indicated on sprint's coverage maps?

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Even stock prls there is 3g roaming. I found I could even roam on VZW in North LA with a standard PRL.

 

Sent from my little Note2

 

You've been in the Ventura/Santa Barbara area roaming? :P

 

Robert via Samsung Note II via Tapatalk

 

 

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Even stock prls there is 3g roaming. I found I could even roam on VZW in North LA with a standard PRL.

 

Sent from my little Note2

 

im on a stock prl, 25010

 

 

If you do a lot of roaming, be careful with your streaming, as even streaming over CDMA1X can easily transfer 15-60 MB per hour. And that can eat fairly quickly into the 300 MB per month roaming quota.

 

AJ

 

shouldnt be an issue, i typically dont see more than about 50MB a month roaming. then again i rarely go over 150MB a month on sprint. thanks for the heads up though

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Are u finding 3g roaming on stock prl's outside of the 3g roaming areas indicated on sprint's coverage maps?

 

All Sprint PRLs have 3G roaming, in fact, that is all they do. 1x is a 3G technology from all the tech stuff I have read. EVDO is just the next evolution of it.

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You've been in the Ventura/Santa Barbara area roaming? :P

 

Yeah, he got "sideways" in Santa Barbara County wine country.

 

;)

 

AJ

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All Sprint PRLs have 3G roaming' date=' in fact, that is all they do. 1x is a 3G technology from all the tech stuff I have read. EVDO is just the next evolution of it.[/quote']

 

Correcting my terminology does not answer my question, though its humorous.

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I think you all (most at least) might be surprised by the sheer number of different PRLs that Sprint has for different reasons/account types.

 

There are different PRLs for 3G EVDO / non-EVDO / LTE / WiMax devices, then there are different ones for each type of Data Card as well (3G Only / 3G+WiMax / 3G+WiMax+LTE), etc.

 

Then you have the different PRLs for corporate accounts versus consumer accounts... It actually makes me a little sad (personally) that Sprint employee lines are only slated to get standard consumer PRLs and not the corporate 3G roaming PRLs.

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And they really only need about a quarter of them. Ridiculous.

 

Sent from my little Note2

 

They actually are in the process of merging many of the PRL families together now. I believe the 66xxx series merged with the 24xxx series for starters (I could have the numbers completely wrong, so don't quote me on it, haha).

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