It kinda did.  Thanks for clarifying.   I, however,  still think Sprint needed to cash in the chips.   They have never been able to fully utilize the spectrum they had since the Nextel days and would probably ended up selling some of band 41 off  as Masa Son wanted to do.    They have been financially constrained big time for the last 8-12 years or more.  They have been a constant 3rd place or 4th since they began offering full scale cellular service in 1998 or so.   Growth and possible improvement all seem to point to having to merge to improve.  They did.      Perhaps,.... maybe now, the 2.5 G will get fully implemented to our delight and we'll all enjoy a much better network.    I don't even like to discuss this "should of been", "could of been" or "what if's"  ...I'm guilty of it myself!   It's just such a waste of time.   Lets move on and hope for better things to come.

They don't need a permit to swap from an 8T8R to a M-MIMO panel. That's why a lot of sites with KMW 16-port triband antennas have an inactive 8T8R next to them.  Any chance you were able to snag some photos of the site? If not, the mast is relatively low, and you can probably get good photos from the parking lot of Cedar Park Christian School.

If you saw how well Sprint 5G performs on current handsets you would not say that, no overheating, good battery life and solid network performance, in my opinion considering how little funding Sprint has gotten, it's very impressive how well they are performing from handset and network standpoint.  But alas; "Sprint sucks" is the mantra everyone has adopted and higher ups are good with that.  Just makes this merger thing that much easier to make happen if as many people as possible believe that.

I don't have a 5G phone, so I have no clue. I have seen sector IDs greater than 20 but not sure if that means anything besides the fact it is no longer triband. Interestingly, I can't find a permit for this change despite the fact the change is very recent. 

If that's the impression that I gave off that was definitely not my intention. Just illustrating that Sprint never needed this, they just wanted to put profit ahead of true competition.