Marcelo Claure, Town Hall Meetings, New Family Share Pack Plan, Unlimited Individual Plan, Discussion Thread

[utiz4321]

35 minutes ago, danlodish345 said:

What is wrong with Sprint why is it so slow?

It is a deliberate choice on the part of sprint on how it uses it's 2.5 spectrum. They can allocate the spectrum Used in their channels in multiple ways and they have choosen to maximize download speeds because you simply don't need as much band width on the upload side. 

[danlodish345]

1 minute ago, utiz4321 said:

It is a deliberate choice on the part of sprint on how it uses it's 2.5 spectrum. They can allocate the spectrum Used in their channels in multiple ways and they have choosen to maximize download speeds because you simply don't need as  band width on the upload side. 

True okay now I'm just trying to understand what you're saying.

[nexgencpu]

3 minutes ago, danlodish345 said:

Can't they design it to be faster for uploads as well?

They are, the plan is to CA upload to increase peaks to about 18mbs, but also add intraband CA to include B25 and B26 as PCC for increased upload speeds.

[utiz4321]

6 minutes ago, danlodish345 said:

Can't they design it to be faster for uploads as well?

Why would they? They dont need the bandwidth on the upload side. You down load far more than you upload. 

[though]

17 minutes ago, utiz4321 said:

Why would they? They dont need the bandwidth on the upload side. You down load far more than you upload. 

Some may say that, others don't. If you are constantly sharing/uploading videos and pics, upload is where it's at...

[jamesinclair]

22 hours ago, RedSpark said:

That's right. Marcelo shared some stats on it here:

Separately, some of you have written about our recent BYOD trial offering a free year of service, and what impact this would have on the quarter. This offer represented 1% of our postpaid phone gross additions in the quarter, which was in line with our expectation, and has provided good insights into digital sales and marketing. This offer test a complete end-to-end digital acquisition model that could materially lower sales costs, if capable of scaling to a significant volume. Also, this represent a different approach to the high cost of subscriber acquisition in our industry.

 

This blows my mind. if youre already switching to Sprint....why not take an entire year for free?

[utiz4321]

2 minutes ago, though said:

Some may say that, others don't. If you are constantly sharing/uploading videos and pics, upload is where it's at...

No. The math says that. Which is why the designed their network the way they did. The amount of data used in uploads are a fraction of downloads. 

[nexgencpu]

12 minutes ago, though said:

Some may say that, others don't. If you are constantly sharing/uploading videos and pics, upload is where it's at...

I find that upload rarely if ever become saturated. Slow uploads are generally seen when signal is at the edge. Throw in a Magic box and watch your uploads hit 5-9mbs all day coming from the same macro site that your handset exhibits slow uploads from.

[RedSpark]

24 minutes ago, jamesinclair said:

 

This blows my mind. if youre already switching to Sprint....why not take an entire year for free?

This Offer is not marketed at all. It's essentially word of mouth, which is by design. Sprint wanted to test a completely self-service digital offer that runs with essentially no promotion or advertising. The most exposure this deal got was on Slickdeals or on other boards.

The program is self-limiting in a way: People have to own their device, know how to do BYOD and have an eligible device on the BYOD list for the Program: https://www.sprint.com/en/shop/offers/free-unlimited.html

Not everyone meets these criteria or hears about the Offer.

[RedSpark]

53 minutes ago, utiz4321 said:

It is a deliberate choice on the part of sprint on how it uses it's 2.5 spectrum. They can allocate the spectrum Used in their channels in multiple ways and they have choosen to maximize download speeds because you simply don't need as much band width on the upload side. 

Wouldn't it also be the case that if Sprint didn't do this, it wouldn't perform as well in the RootMetrics/OpenSignal/Ookla Download rankings, which is what most people seem to pay the most attention to?

[though]

4 minutes ago, RedSpark said:

Wouldn't it also be the case that if Sprint didn't do this, it wouldn't perform as well in the RootMetrics/OpenSignal/Ookla Download rankings, which is what most people seem to pay the most attention to?

this seems to make the most sense to me!

[Arysyn]

37 minutes ago, danlodish345 said:

True okay now I'm just trying to understand what you're saying.

Dan, one of the biggest benefits to band41 2.5ghz spectrum is in its designation as TDD spectrum, rather than FDD. The difference is with FDD, which is the spectrum most carriers in the U.S. utilize, comes in equal/even pairs, such as you'll see when someone mentions 5x5, 10x10, 15x15, 20x20, and so on. What this means is the downlink spectrum amount and the uplink spectrum amount. With FDD there isn't an ability to make variations to that. Such as a carrier with 40ghz of say, the 600mhz spectrum. The carrier cannot decide to take, again say 30 mhz of it for using it as downlink spectrum, and the other 10 mhz for uplink spectrum. Therefore, there isn't 30x10. Reverse that, you won't see 10x30 either for areas where perhaps more uplink is needed. That just isn't how FDD works.

TDD spectrum is different. Sprint's band41 is TDD. With TDD, the uplink and downlink can be altered to accommodate more needs of one versus the other, but it isn't inherently such number by such number. If I'm right about this, I think the spectrum is limited to 20mhz, where I suppose you could say the spectrum is 10x10 at the maximum, but that can be altered around, such as 15x5, 5x15, etc. To expand this spectrum, as Sprint has around 120mhz of band 41, carrier aggregation is needed. 2xca uses 40mhz, 3xca uses 60mhz, 4xca uses 80mhz, 5xca uses 100mhz, and 6xca uses 120mhz. I think the current maximum ca Sprint has is 3xca, though when next year's modem is in smartphones allowing 6xca, and after the merger if it goes through, I expect T-Mobile will release 6xca on band41.

[though]

31 minutes ago, utiz4321 said:

No. The math says that. Which is why the designed their network the way they did. The amount of data used in uploads are a fraction of downloads. 

You sound like the retentions dept. of my Cable provider when i switched to Fiber 

[Paynefanbro]

Two things worth noting are that Marcelo Claure said that 60% of their sites have Band 41 active now, they've deployed more small cells in the last quarter than they have in the past 2 years, and they still plan on having Band 41 on 100% of their towers by the end of the fiscal year. My guess is that if the merger goes through, if a site get decommissioned they'll simply take the the Band 41 equipment off of the Sprint site and move it to a T-Mobile site.

[utiz4321]

3 hours ago, RedSpark said:

Wouldn't it also be the case that if Sprint didn't do this, it wouldn't perform as well in the RootMetrics/OpenSignal/Ookla Download rankings, which is what most people seem to pay the most attention to?

Yup

3 hours ago, though said:

You sound like the retentions dept. of my Cable provider when i switched to Fiber 

Stick with them, they sound intelligent :). 

[though]

2 hours ago, utiz4321 said:

Yup

Stick with them, they sound intelligent :). 

Ya, no thanks. Sprint must know something that AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile don't??? I don't think so...

[utiz4321]

12 minutes ago, though said:

Ya, no thanks. Sprint must know something that AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile don't??? I don't think so...

Nope. Please learn about what you are talking about before you start posting nonsense all over the public space. The other carriers dont have the option of allocating spectrum the war sprint can or they would. It has nothing to do with what one of the companies "know" amd the others do not and all about the way the spectrum is used. 

[though]

11 minutes ago, utiz4321 said:

Nope. Please learn about what you are talking about before you start posting nonsense all over the public space. The other carriers dont have the option of allocating spectrum the war sprint can or they would. It has nothing to do with what one of the companies "know" amd the others do not and all about the way the spectrum is used. 

I know enough about how bandwidth works to know what works best for my needs, as well as many others. 2 Bazillion down and 1 trickle up simply doesn't make sense for everyone's needs. HEYYY look how fast our network is..... we can pump out 200Mb/s down!! (but cough cough, upload peaks out at 8Mb). So when you are in a congested area or a spotty service area (which there's plenty), you might have a 3Mb/s download speed (which is ok for most everyone), however upload is at .20 Mb/s which blows.

I'm not speaking for everyone, however fast upload speeds and low ping times makes a world of difference in the real world of the internet...

[utiz4321]

5 minutes ago, though said:

I know enough about how bandwidth works to know what works best for my needs, as well as many others. 2 Bazillion down and 1 trickle up simply doesn't make sense for everyone's needs. HEYYY look how fast our network is..... we can pump out 200Mb/s down!! (but cough cough, upload peaks out at 8Mb). So when you are in a congested area or a spotty service area (which there's plenty), you might have a 3Mb/s download speed (which is ok for most everyone), however upload is at .20 Mb/s which blows.

I'm not speaking for everyone, however fast upload speeds and low ping times makes a world of difference in the real world of the internet...

Your not speaking for anyone. Sprint's job is to manage the network it a way makes sense for their user base and they do a good job of it. If you are up loading a picture spoiler it can continue to happen when you put it in your pocket.  Video calls are about the most taxing thing you can do on the upload side and it works just fine with sprint's current configuration. 

[though]

You are right, I'm not speaking for anyone.

Honest question, would you prefer 200 Mb down, 8 Mb up or 100 Mb down, 100 Mb up, same pings?

[nexgencpu]

16 minutes ago, though said:

You are right, I'm not speaking for anyone.

Honest question, would you prefer 200 Mb down, 8 Mb up or 100 Mb down, 100 Mb up, same pings?

I will say it again, B41's uploads are NOT congested. That is not the issue, the issue is signal strength. Once they pair it with a lower freqency band you will see more typical uploads of 5mb+ in lower signal situation.

This makes sense since you can allocate a ton of spectrum to the download and cap spectrum usage to narrower bands, it's quite ingenious, and is why Neville Ray is salivating over 2.5 

[greenbastard]

11 minutes ago, nexgencpu said:

I will say it again, B41's uploads are NOT congested. 

No one is saying that. Upload limitations on B41 are due to the change in timing configuration.

Sprint should have waited for interband CA phones (B25+B41) or at the very least allowed intraband CA upload on B41. Changing the timing configuration made it hard (and sometimes impossible) to do trivial things such as sharing pictures or sending MMS with a weak signal. In places where I used to get 1-2 Mbps upload, I could no longer do video calls. Speed tests would even time out on the UL portion from time to time after getting 10 Mbps on the DL.

Upload speeds are more important than ever before in today's social climate (sharing everything we do). Sprint needs to address them if the merger doesn't go through.

[cyclone]

The issue with low upload speeds are found on those that have their phones running background programs such as photo backups. With the upload speeds already lower priority, in congested areas or areas with weak signal, this causes a traffic jam if you want to throw in something simple like texting into the mix. Especially those with iPhones operating through iMessage. It's not a constant problem, but it's a noticeable problem in very real and possibly frequent scenarios, i.e. tourism. I'd much rather have the 100/100 over 200/8 option. To keep with the analogy, data is referred to as traffic for a reason and lets remember that in popular areas, traffic happens twice a day and the lanes need to be ready to handle both sides of the flow.

[nexgencpu]

2 minutes ago, greenbastard said:

No one is saying that. Upload limitations on B41 are due to the change in timing configuration.

Sprint should have waited for interband CA phones (B25+B41) or at the very least allowed intraband CA upload on B41. Changing the timing configuration made it hard (and sometimes impossible) to do trivial things such as sharing pictures or sending MMS with a weak signal. In places where I used to get 1-2 Mbps upload, I could no longer do video calls. Speed tests would even time out on the UL portion from time to time after getting 10 Mbps on the DL.

Upload speeds are more important than ever before in today's social climate (sharing everything we do). Sprint needs to address them if the merger doesn't go through.

This is a different argument, I've heard multiple times in this discussion that uploads are congested. But let me tell you, in my personal case where my area is limited to 2xCA, the change in config brought on nearly equal upload and download, where before, uploads consistently outperformed downloads.

[utiz4321]

5 minutes ago, greenbastard said:

No one is saying that. Upload limitations on B41 are due to the change in timing configuration.

Sprint should have waited for interband CA phones (B25+B41) or at the very least allowed intraband CA upload on B41. Changing the timing configuration made it hard (and sometimes impossible) to do trivial things such as sharing pictures or sending MMS with a weak signal. In places where I used to get 1-2 Mbps upload, I could no longer do video calls. Speed tests would even time out on the UL portion from time to time after getting 10 Mbps on the DL.

Upload speeds are more important than ever before in today's social climate (sharing everything we do). Sprint needs to address them if the merger doesn't go through.

I cant think of one time sprint wasnt able to handle an upload. They know more about how people use their phones than you or I do.