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


joshuam

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11 hours ago, clbowens said:

Wish they would add lots in the Cleveland area.  I'm seeing TONS of other carriers small cells go up.

There are lots of Sprint small cells in the Cleveland area.  Joski1624 just needs more help in finding them.  This can be as simple as doing your regular driving/traveling and getting SignalCheck Pro to log the best RSRP for each site, and sending in your logs for analysis.  The more people doing it in a market the easier it becomes.  When ever I am up in Cleveland it is easy for me to find 10 new small cells.  Much easier for someone who lives there and you don't even have to go out of your way! 

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3 minutes ago, though said:

Sorry for my ignorance, what's the difference between LTE Advanced and Gigabit-Class?

It related most importantly to the internal throughput of the phone, then various signal capabilities enter into play, such as 4x4 MIMO.

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1 hour ago, though said:

Sorry for my ignorance, what's the difference between LTE Advanced and Gigabit-Class?

LTE-Advance means anything above LTE-Release 9 generally speaking. Things like carrier aggregation, LTE relay, small cells, multi layer beamforming, etc etc. 


Gigabit class means it uses a combination of LTE-A technologies in order to each up to gigabit speeds theoretically. In this case it's utilizing 3 carrier aggregation of 20 MHz TDD  plus 256-64 QAM on downlink uplink and 4x4 MIMO on eNB / UE. Thus 

3x(112.5*1.33*2) for devices which comes out to around 900 mbps if you have a device capable of doing 12 MIMO streams (4 MIMO + 4 MIMO + 4 MIMO). 

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4 hours ago, clbowens said:

Would this include all of the surrounding Cleveland suburbs?

Each suburb likely varies.  Based on what I see in the Columbus metro, if Verizon has small cells in that suburb, the Sprint likely has a few as well.  AT&T are rare.  We have not found a T-Mobile one yet.  Post a your question about what suburbs you travel in and what areas concern you to the Cleveland market threads.  This thread is possible, but quite slow:

 

The action starts in this thread which requires a contribution (the cost of your usual work lunch is recommended) for 6 months of usage and has a lot of valuable data in it:

The Premier Cleveland thread is really where you want to be for B26 and B41, but you would need to make a larger contribution (if people really like you, you can earn your way there with lots of SignalCheck pro logs for Cleveland -- but you still need to start in Sponsor).

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https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/t-mobile-inks-533m-reciprocal-long-term-spectrum-lease-deal-sprint?utm_source=internal&utm_medium=rss
 
So spectrum will exchange hands via lease soon. Any ideas which areas will be impacted the most?

In any case these swaps will be un even .. most of tmos low band is in use or not cleared and they don’t have a ton of mid band ..


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On 10/31/2018 at 3:27 PM, RedSpark said:

In my opinion, that bump is based on merger speculation, not Sprint's underlying fundamentals.

So the stock just happened to bounce on a day that Sprint posted better than expected financial results then (and where the merger by and large went fairly un-disscussed)? Okay... Churn and subscriber losses are something to watch, but near term they were over shined by one of Sprint's best financial quarters in a while.

On 10/31/2018 at 11:17 AM, bigsnake49 said:

Thanks, I found it int the earnings report. It's what they should have been spending every quarter. I wonder how much of that is  making every site triband vs new macro sites vs small cells.

In August Saw said they were up up to about 2/3 of macro sites having all 3 bands. Yesterday they said 70%. If you assume they went from 65-70% and assume they have about 40,000 macro sites that is about 2,000 sites in 3 months. In August they said they had 15,000 total small cells deployed, 10,000 of them being strand mounts. Yesterday it was 21,000 with 15,000 being strand mounts.

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8 hours ago, Mr.Nuke said:

So the stock just happened to bounce on a day that Sprint posted better than expected financial results then (and where the merger by and large went fairly un-disscussed)? Okay... Churn and subscriber losses are something to watch, but near term they were over shined by one of Sprint's best financial quarters in a while.

In my honest opinion, the financial results themselves don’t show the deeper issues with the fundamentals that the company is facing and the stock bump itself was favorable merger speculation in light of Sprint’s continued underperformance.

Sprint’s Dow Draper laid out the fundamentals to the FCC: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1092573429427/Sprint Ex Parte - FULL Dow Draper Presentation - 9.21.2018 - REDACTED.pdf

Slide 7:

• “As a result of our network performance limitations and perception, Sprint has consistently had the highest churn in the industry and failed to retain its subscriber base”

• “Sprint is the only carrier with rising churn over the last several years”

• “Postpaid customer survivability over 18 months is only [redacted] we are losing a substantial portion of our base”

Slide 10:

“Sprint is becoming a smaller company and is actually losing scale, whereas achieving sustainable growth requires Sprint to increase scale”

Slide 11:

• “Sprint has eliminated about $10 billion in annual costs, allowing it to boost near-term profitability”

• “But cost cutting is nearing its limit and becoming more difficult”

Slide 13:

• “Despite cost cutting, Sprint still must spend significantly more per subscriber, per month, to support its wireless offerings, illustrating scale disadvantages from low subscriber share”

Sprint’s latest financial numbers didn’t show what’s going on below the surface. Sprint’s net/gross adds and churn do. Dow’s presentation was on 9/21/2018. We’re around 40 days later. Sprint’s on the edge of a death spiral in my honest opinion.

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I continue to find Sprint's poor position to be kind of depressing given the natural advantages that Sprint should have.  When AT&T deploys more spectrum, for example, they have to send a crew out to touch a site, whether to add a radio or an antenna or both.  They're in the midst of rolling out Band 14 which, of course, requires new equipment at the sites, even sites that already have four bands of LTE, many of which appear to have been installed with separate tower touches.  With Sprint's Band 41 holdings, as long as Band 41 equipment is in place, adding spectrum should be as simple as changing software settings.  As long as the backhaul is fiber, that should be relatively straight-forward to increase as well.  Even on PCS, because of the Network Vision upgrades, refarming spectrum should be very cheap and not require much if any additional equipment.  For Sprint, adding bandwidth should be significantly less expensive than it is for other carriers, and yet despite that advantage, it is in the position of weakness.

I hope that someone writes a book about how Sprint got to this position one day; one of those well-researched and heavily-sourced ones.  It would be a fascinating read.

- Trip

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2 hours ago, Trip said:

I hope that someone writes a book about how Sprint got to this position one day; one of those well-researched and heavily-sourced ones.  It would be a fascinating read.

- Trip

The first chapter needs to be about Gary Forsee, chapter 2 should mention the word Nextel.

Sprint was on a roll with 3G EV-DO back in the day and one of the best 3G networks back then, I believe Sprint would have been a competitive and strong company if they stayed away from Nextel and focused on additional 3G sites and future spending on new spectrum. Instead Sprint devoted their time to purchasing Nextel's lackluster  800 iDEN nework that ended up causing more headache once it was known that it was causing interference with 800 public safety radio systems.  

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30 minutes ago, JossMan said:

The first chapter needs to be about Gary Forsee, chapter 2 should mention the word Nextel.

Sprint was on a roll with 3G EV-DO back in the day and one of the best 3G networks back then, I believe Sprint would have been a competitive and strong company if they stayed away from Nextel and focused on additional 3G sites and future spending on new spectrum. Instead Sprint devoted their time to purchasing Nextel's lackluster  800 iDEN nework that ended up causing more headache once it was known that it was causing interference with 800 public safety radio systems.  

Indeed it should.

Nobody anticipated the interference issues ahead of time?

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31 minutes ago, nexgencpu said:

Surprised no one has mentioned the upgraded plans with upto 100gb of Hotspot etc..

https://www.sprint.com/en/shop/plans/unlimited-cell-phone-plan.html?INTNAV=TopNav:Shop:UnlimitedPlans

The new plans are a rip-off, I would be spending an additional $35 a month for the same features with the new plans compared to my current one unlimited freedom v17.

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3 minutes ago, BlueAngel said:

The new plans are a rip-off, I would be spending an additional $35 a month for the same features with the new plans compared to my current one unlimited freedom v17.

New plan includes prime/hulu/tidal and upto 100gb hotspot, does the old plan include that as well(obviously not the 100gb)? If it does, then its definitely a sizable increase in price.

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8 minutes ago, nexgencpu said:

New plan includes prime/hulu/tidal and upto 100gb hotspot, does the old plan include that as well(obviously not the 100gb)? If it does, then its definitely a sizable increase in price.

I get Hulu and 10GB of hotspot which I don't ever use, plus HD streaming for two lines. It's a lot more for less. And that's not talking about adding HD streaming to both lines that's another $20 so $55 for the same features more or less.

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Just now, BlueAngel said:

I get Hulu and 10GB of hotspot which I don't ever use, plus HD streaming for two lines. It's a lot more for less.

If you dont need Prime and Tidal plus the crazy hotspot then your current plan is fine. But i wouldnt call it a rip off, more like a slight upsell.

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Just now, nexgencpu said:

If you dont need Prime and Tidal plus the crazy hotspot then your current plan is fine. But i wouldnt call it a rip off, more like a slight upsell.

I guess you're right, if I needed more hotspot and all that other junk it might be a good deal, but for someone who only uses the HD streaming and Hulu occasionally it's not a good deal.

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3 hours ago, Trip said:

I continue to find Sprint's poor position to be kind of depressing given the natural advantages that Sprint should have.  When AT&T deploys more spectrum, for example, they have to send a crew out to touch a site, whether to add a radio or an antenna or both.  They're in the midst of rolling out Band 14 which, of course, requires new equipment at the sites, even sites that already have four bands of LTE, many of which appear to have been installed with separate tower touches.  With Sprint's Band 41 holdings, as long as Band 41 equipment is in place, adding spectrum should be as simple as changing software settings.  As long as the backhaul is fiber, that should be relatively straight-forward to increase as well.  Even on PCS, because of the Network Vision upgrades, refarming spectrum should be very cheap and not require much if any additional equipment.  For Sprint, adding bandwidth should be significantly less expensive than it is for other carriers, and yet despite that advantage, it is in the position of weakness.

I hope that someone writes a book about how Sprint got to this position one day; one of those well-researched and heavily-sourced ones.  It would be a fascinating read.

- Trip

I agree with you. It would be a fascinating read.

We kept hearing for years about how Network Vision was going to make things easier, that Sprint's trove of 2.5 GHz was its unique competitive advantage and that Carrier Aggregation was essentially a software update after the new equipment was installed. (We're now hearing the same thing for Massive MIMO and 5G: that everything is just an equipment install/swap and software update away.)

However... the equipment wasn't actually installed at an appreciable pace because there wasn't enough capex. According to Dr. Saw's blog post, as of a year ago, 2.5 GHz was deployed on only approximately 50% of Sprint's sites. Now it's on roughly 70% of its sites, and they say they're going to have it on a "majority" of Sprint's sites by the end of Fiscal 2018, which is 3/31/2019. I guess we'll see what "majority" ultimately winds up being.

Marcelo's public messaging masked what was really going on. Things were made to look bigger than they were.

The true gravity of Sprint's precarious position was finally revealed in Sprint's FCC filings, especially this one from September which I mentioned earlier: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1092573429427/Sprint Ex Parte - FULL Dow Draper Presentation - 9.21.2018 - REDACTED.pdf

You can't compete on cost cutting alone... and we're nearing the end of that by now.

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1 hour ago, RedSpark said:

Indeed it should.

Nobody anticipated the interference issues ahead of time?

I had to work on the issue first hand back in 2009/2010 when I was on the communications board for my county.  Back then our county operated a Motorola SmartNet Type 2 800 system that was experiencing this Nextel interference issue after Sprint purchased Nextel.  I suspected that Nextel knew about this becoming problem later down the road due to the fact that Nextel had went all around buying up 800 licenses for their iDEN network.  

Sprint not only had to pay for the re banding of our system but had to purchase our county entirely new radios both portable and mobile units due to the fact that the current configuration on the radio system which was built in 1997 wouldn't take the re-banded frequencies.  

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