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

[Terrell352]

But then again as well you need coverage for it. Speed is useless without coverage. I don't really care too much about speed what I really care about is a coverage and consistency of the network. Density is also an issue with 5G.

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It's an issue with Sprint 5G. But 85000 macro towers and lord knows how many small cells that tmobile would have should be enough.

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[danlodish345]

It's an issue with Sprint 5G. But 85000 macro towers and lord knows how many small cells that tmobile would have should be enough.

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Yeah I hope T-Mobile doesn't decommission any small cells that would work to their detriment. My man curiosity is in remote and rural areas of the country.

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[Brad The Beast]

Just now, danlodish345 said:

My man curiosity is in remote and rural areas of the country.
 

Same since both T-Mobile and Sprint have abysmal rural coverage. 

[Terrell352]

Same since both T-Mobile and Sprint have abysmal rural coverage. 

Tmobile claims they cover 99% of Americans. Most of us call BS but the average customer might not notice.

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[radem]

4 minutes ago, danlodish345 said:

But then again as well you need coverage for it. Speed is useless without coverage. I don't really care too much about speed what I really care about is a coverage and consistency of the network. Density is also an issue with 5G.

This a thousand times.  99% of customers do not care about maximum speed.  They just want their mobile device to work properly for whatever they are trying to do wherever they are located.  It is much more important to get rid of no service areas and to improve capacity at sites where capacity is maxed out causing users to get no effective data throughput than it is to win the max speed measuring contests.

[Brad The Beast]

Just now, Terrell352 said:

Tmobile claims they cover 99% of Americans. Most of us call BS but the average customer might not notice.

Oh no it's complete BS just like their coverage map. They say most of North Dakota is covered which is completely false. 

[jebr]

14 hours ago, RedSpark said:

The crazy promotions should have been spent on capex instead.

Those promotions were all for nought in my opinion. They didn’t wind up creating enough long term customers out of them. The underlying product didn’t convey a sense of true value without being on a promotion. People left because they didn’t perceive Sprint as a brand worth the regular cost.

All these crazy promotions did was defer the customer losses we’re seeing now for a year or two or three. They didn’t make sense to do in the first place.

Sprint missed a real opportunity for effective capex in the past few years, customer losses be damned, because they’re happening right now anyway and Sprint is well behind the curve on where it should be on its network. If the product improves, people won’t leave if they perceive value.... but if it doesn’t measure up, they won’t come in the first place.

The problem is, if you don't have the revenue to support building out the network, you can't really build out the network. If you can add more people to the network, even at a reduced cost, that's still more money for capex. This is especially true if you can add them places where you have existing excess capacity - then their network hit is minimal to existing customers while allowing coverage to be expanded or densified elsewhere. Promotions help to draw more people in, ideally getting them to stay long-term (and, in a perfect world, convert them to customers who will pay full rack rate for the service.)

That said, there's certainly a balance to be had on the promotions. The one year free seemed like a particularly poor choice - you seek out the deal seekers without getting any particular sticking point for them to stay once the year is up. Since it's BYOD, people can easily switch away once that free year is up. The other promos (Kickstart and the initial promo rates on regular plans) are better promos in different ways.

Kickstart is good because it provides a consistent source of revenue ($15-$25 plus tax per month) while being extremely inexpensive to deliver. Sure, you're not getting a ton of money each month, but you're still getting some, and you don't have to pay for phone leases or store support (at least with the first few iterations.) I believe you can kick them down into deprioritization when traffic is high to help preserve the experience for customers paying full price. Ideally, these customers would be ones that need little to no support, manage their own devices, and simply keep the auto-pay going every month for their service.

The promo rates are decent because there's ideally going to be a tie-in that keeps them in longer-term (phone leases, ideally) while still giving them that first-year savings that can convince them to switch. They're also used to paying something for the service, so jumping from $100 to $140 for 4 lines is more stomachable than jumping from $0 to that same $140. It's the same model that cable companies use, though there they have the benefit of less competition as well.

[danlodish345]

Same since both T-Mobile and Sprint have abysmal rural coverage. 

Yeah I called complete bowl pies on their coverage after the merger..

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[danlodish345]

This a thousand times.  99% of customers do not care about maximum speed.  They just want their mobile device to work properly for whatever they are trying to do wherever they are located.  It is much more important to get rid of no service areas and to improve capacity at sites where capacity is maxed out causing users to get no effective data throughput than it is to win the max speed measuring contests.

Exactly T-Mobile covers my town much better than Sprint. but springs highway coverage is pretty good but once you get off the main highway and go a mile West the service drops the roaming or 3-g which is completely useless. so I'm interested to see if the merger will improve things in my area.

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[Terrell352]

Exactly T-Mobile covers my town much better than Sprint. but springs highway coverage is pretty good but once you get off the main highway and go a mile West the service drops the roaming or 3-g which is completely useless. so I'm interested to see if the merger will improve things in my area.

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I'm surprised Tmobile roaming is not already making that happen.

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[danlodish345]

I'm surprised Tmobile roaming is not already making that happen.

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Yeah it's not enabled here as far as I'm aware of. I have T-Mobile as my main carrier and Sprint as my backup. I have noticed no roaming here in town.

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[Brad The Beast]

I don't see why Sprint doesn't capitalize on markets where it's the Verizon and AT&T show. My area is very much the Verizon and AT&T show. T-Mobile is hot garbage and Sprint is meh. Verizon congestion is pretty bad here so I don't see why they don't capitalize on that. I get 10 - 15Mbps around town and this is while all of the college students are gone. I can only imagine how much worse it is during the school year. I get 5Mbps max at home and at work. I get 10 - 20Mbps at home and 20 - 30Mbps at work with Sprint.

[dkyeager]

11 hours ago, Tengen31 said:

Or are making it up since we don't see any pics of the tests. Every Sprint small call I was ever on way slow at it only had 1 carrier vs 2-4 xca on the other carriers.

This does not match my experience.  Many Sprint small cells in Ohio have two carriers (no CA).  We have gotten 70Mbps off of relay fed, faster off of fiber fed.  Now many are in the 30-40Mbs range.

[dkyeager]

8 hours ago, Brad The Beast said:

I don't see why Sprint doesn't capitalize on markets where it's the Verizon and AT&T show. My area is very much the Verizon and AT&T show. T-Mobile is hot garbage and Sprint is meh. Verizon congestion is pretty bad here so I don't see why they don't capitalize on that. I get 10 - 15Mbps around town and this is while all of the college students are gone. I can only imagine how much worse it is during the school year. I get 5Mbps max at home and at work. I get 10 - 20Mbps at home and 20 - 30Mbps at work with Sprint.

Where Sprint improves, the duo will quickly put money in and hammer them down.  I see this happen often enough to say it happens within 6 months.  Sprint has not even publicized at that point.  The Duo watch speed test results.

[belusnecropolis]

2 hours ago, dkyeager said:

Where Sprint improves, the duo will quickly put money in and hammer them down.  I see this happen often enough to say it happens within 6 months.  Sprint has not even publicized at that point.  The Duo watch speed test results.

The Denver Example.

[ingenium]

Yes they obviously need much more. More capacity is needed. But then again more cell site density is also needed.

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Sprint can easily fix capacity on some sites if they wanted to, with the opex expense. There's unused B41 that they could have deployed on just some sectors (such as ones covering stadiums and venues, where the current sectors are overloaded to the point of not working at all). Most Sprint sites don't even have the backhaul to fully utilize the spectrum that is on air. Not to mention the lack of rank 3 and 4, meaning they don't get the speed boost from 4x4. They probably figure there's no reason to enable it since they don't have the backhaul for it anyway.

There are lots of ways Sprint could add capacity without adding macros, but they don't.

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[danlodish345]

Sprint can easily fix capacity on some sites if they wanted to, with the opex expense. There's unused B41 that they could have deployed on just some sectors (such as ones covering stadiums and venues, where the current sectors are overloaded to the point of not working at all). Most Sprint sites don't even have the backhaul to fully utilize the spectrum that is on air. Not to mention the lack of rank 3 and 4, meaning they don't get the speed boost from 4x4. They probably figure there's no reason to enable it since they don't have the backhaul for it anyway.

There are lots of ways Sprint could add capacity without adding macros, but they don't.

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Well they still obviously also have to fix their dead spots. The dead spots that are within their own footprint. I haven't seen that happened here yet. But I'd like to see improvements though.

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[Brad The Beast]

6 hours ago, dkyeager said:

Where Sprint improves, the duo will quickly put money in and hammer them down.  I see this happen often enough to say it happens within 6 months.  Sprint has not even publicized at that point.  The Duo watch speed test results.

Really? Interesting. Good to know. Although I don't know what else Verizon could really do to help the congestion issues here. 

[mdob07]

6 hours ago, dkyeager said:

Where Sprint improves, the duo will quickly put money in and hammer them down.  I see this happen often enough to say it happens within 6 months.  Sprint has not even publicized at that point.  The Duo watch speed test results.

 

28 minutes ago, Brad The Beast said:

Really? Interesting. Good to know. Although I don't know what else Verizon could really do to help the congestion issues here. 

I've seen that here between AT&T and Verizon. Verizon has been ranked #1 here but with AT&Ts upgrades they are are feeling the pressure. They recently widened their B5 carrier to 10x10 even with their 1x carrier still Iive in the middle of it. They also have their EvDo channel in the middle of a 5x5 B2 carrier. 

[Brad The Beast]

3 hours ago, mdob07 said:

I've seen that here between AT&T and Verizon. Verizon has been ranked #1 here but with AT&Ts upgrades they are are feeling the pressure. They recently widened their B5 carrier to 10x10 even with their 1x carrier still Iive in the middle of it. They also have their EvDo channel in the middle of a 5x5 B2 carrier. 

I'm connected to 15x15 band 66 with 10MHz band 13 downlink CA and I'm barely able to hit 5Mbps. This is even with all of the small cells and mini macros that Verizon has deployed. I think Sprint could win the speed game if they wanted to here. 

[mdob07]

2 hours ago, Brad The Beast said:

I'm connected to 15x15 band 66 with 10MHz band 13 downlink CA and I'm barely able to hit 5Mbps. This is even with all of the small cells and mini macros that Verizon has deployed. I think Sprint could win the speed game if they wanted to here. 

Same here in Louisville, I wasn't impressed with Verizon at all, I don't know how Rootmetrics rates them #1. I posted over on HoFo about the day I setup my account at a Verizon store, the associate told me to use their WiFi if i needed to set anything up on my phone because the network was so slow there. That has to be embarrassing for a corporate Verizon store.  Expanding their B5 carrier helped a little, but I didn't see much of a difference in the macro only areas. They even still have a few weird coverage holes within the metro area. I haven't done a lot of speed tests since I've switched back to Sprint but I have tested the network in a few places. So far I've been very impressed, they seem to have come a long way here since I ported out 18 months ago. The new TMO-Sprint would have a very nice spectrum portfolio here to go up against AT&T, and I think they'd blow Verizon out of the water. Sprint actually has more spectrum here than Verizon, 100MHz vs 90MHz, and that could go up if they deploy more B41 carriers beyond 3. Sprint's biggest problem here is density, but they started deploying small cells finally about a year ago.

[S4GRU]

3 hours ago, mdob07 said:

Same here in Louisville, I wasn't impressed with Verizon at all, I don't know how Rootmetrics rates them #1. 

Agreed.  Verizon is over rated and doesn't serve the hype.  Sprint is under rated and doesn't deserve all the trash talk.  People pick winners and losers and over claim the positives and negatives of each.  They have to have someone to cheer and someone to jeer.  If you aren't first, you're nobody. 

I have a Verizon work phone.  It rarely wins in total speed throughput compared to my Sprint and T-Mobile phones (and USCC on Google Fi).  Verizon doesn't win in coverage in my area.  But it's a pretty consistent experience.  And that's good for a lot of people.  Let them have Verizon.  But Sprint has pulled off nearly a miracle the past few years with little capital infusion, in a highly competitive environment and spending billions still in capex.  They just have had to be very deliberate and measured where and how they spent it.

Every year since 2011 Sprint was nearly going bankrupt in the eyes of the naysayers.  Every year, they would claim this was the year they were going to lose it all.  Yet they still have over 54 million customers.  They are nowhere near bankrupt, and doing better by most measures.  And soon it won't even matter.  Because Mr. Legere will be in charge of it all.  And Sprint will be a forgotten name.  But they were not bought out of bankruptcy sale and were not even close to bankruptcy.

Robert

[Terrell352]

Agreed.  Verizon is over rated and doesn't serve the hype.  Sprint is under rated and doesn't deserve all the trash talk.  People pick winners and losers and over claim the positives and negatives of each.  They have to have someone to cheer and someone to jeer.  If you aren't first, you're nobody. 
I have a Verizon work phone.  It rarely wins in total speed throughput compared to my Sprint and T-Mobile phones (and USCC on Google Fi).  Verizon doesn't win in coverage in my area.  But it's a pretty consistent experience.  And that's good for a lot of people.  Let them have Verizon.  But Sprint has pulled off nearly a miracle the past few years with little capital infusion, in a highly competitive environment and spending billions still in capex.  They just have had to be very deliberate and measured where and how they spent it.
Every year since 2011 Sprint was nearly going bankrupt in the eyes of the naysayers.  Every year, they would claim this was the year they were going to lose it all.  Yet they still have over 54 million customers.  They are nowhere near bankrupt, and doing better by most measures.  And soon it won't even matter.  Because Mr. Legere will be in charge of it all.  And Sprint will be a forgotten name.  But they were not bought out of bankruptcy sale and were not even close to bankruptcy.
Robert

Well said. Do you think this is good for consumers or eventually will lead to higher prices and less competition?

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[RAvirani]

On 8/3/2019 at 8:00 PM, Terrell352 said:

Why would you want to make 4G faster than 5G? That makes no sense at all. 5G needs to be impressive out of the gate. 80mhz for N41 and 60-80 for LTE. It's less work to do.

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M-MIMO equipment has a 120 MHz bandwidth limit.  That has to be split between LTE and NR.  

[S4GRU]

5 hours ago, Terrell352 said:

Well said. Do you think this is good for consumers or eventually will lead to higher prices and less competition?

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My gut says higher prices.  But it all will come down to DISH.  If DISH sweeps in and buys a lot of Sprint network assets and well funds this and executes well, we could end up with a more solid 4th competitor than Sprint in 5-6 years.  But that's a TALL order.

Robert