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Sprint & T-Mobile Roaming Agreement


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I don't know if this was a SCP/Qualcomm bug or not, but maybe T-Mobile has turned on MFBI. It only lasted a few seconds. This happened on my T-Mobile SIM btw....I don't have a Sprint account at the moment.

I may buy a cheap prepaid line and then port over for the 1 year free promo just so I can track T-Mobile LTE roaming rollout and then the merger.

Screenshot_20180505-102642_1.png

Edited by greenbastard
Forgot to add IMG.
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5 hours ago, greenbastard said:

I don't know if this was a SCP/Qualcomm bug or not, but maybe T-Mobile has turned on MFBI. It only lasted a few seconds. This happened on my T-Mobile SIM btw....I don't have a Sprint account at the moment.

I may buy a cheap prepaid line and then port over for the 1 year free promo just so I can track T-Mobile LTE roaming rollout and then the merger.

Screenshot_20180505-102642_1.png

That’s definitely progress! I’ll be on the lookout for it here in Seattle. 

On an unrelated note, B2/25 MFBI is live for Verizon and I’m hearing B5/26 MFBI is on its way. Interesting, interesting. 

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10 hours ago, greenbastard said:

I don't know if this was a SCP/Qualcomm bug or not, but maybe T-Mobile has turned on MFBI. It only lasted a few seconds. This happened on my T-Mobile SIM btw....I don't have a Sprint account at the moment.

I may buy a cheap prepaid line and then port over for the 1 year free promo just so I can track T-Mobile LTE roaming rollout and then the merger.

Screenshot_20180505-102642_1.png

If it was only just a few seconds and didn't hold, then I'm betting its actually SCP picking up Android cycling thru the bands or in the middle of a network change.  I see Sprint on Tmobile frequencies all the time in West Michigan, but its only a few seconds during B25/B41 changes or dropping to EVDO.

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  • 8 months later...

Phone locked onto T-Mobile B2 earlier tonight in a bit of a Sprint dead zone. Appeared that speeds were throttled. Service ended up bouncing over to native B26 but looks like Sprint isn't disallowing in-market roaming.

There are a few other dead zones around here so I'll report back if I see more of this.

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14 minutes ago, iansltx said:

Phone locked onto T-Mobile B2 earlier tonight in a bit of a Sprint dead zone. Appeared that speeds were throttled. Service ended up bouncing over to native B26 but looks like Sprint isn't disallowing in-market roaming.

There are a few other dead zones around here so I'll report back if I see more of this.

I know if you have a Samsung device you can use ##data# and edit with with passcode 000000 and turn off band 25,26 and 41 and it will either give you tmobile roaming or sprint 3G since tmobile roaming is not active on all towers. 

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1 minute ago, JLevoLTE said:

I know if you have a Samsung device you can use ##data# and edit with with passcode 000000 and turn off band 25,26 and 41 and it will either give you tmobile roaming or sprint 3G since tmobile roaming is not active on all towers. 

This was with my PH-1. Zero fiddling with MSL, ##DATA#, etc. Though...y'know what...let's see if 4636'ing to LTE only and turning off 25/26/41 puts my on TMo here.

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Dropped 25/26/41 and, after a bit of delay (and having to restart 3x because each band drop/add requires a restart), locked onto B4 and B2 on T-Mobile. Looks like LTE roaming is treated similarly to international roaming in terms of routing (latency was 130-150ms with a huge amount of jitter), plus speed throttling at ~3 Mbps down plus a bit of overprovisioning. Upload speeds don't appear to be throttled; was seeing 6-7 Mbps, which iirc is about right for this particular location.

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22 minutes ago, iansltx said:

Dropped 25/26/41 and, after a bit of delay (and having to restart 3x because each band drop/add requires a restart), locked onto B4 and B2 on T-Mobile. Looks like LTE roaming is treated similarly to international roaming in terms of routing (latency was 130-150ms with a huge amount of jitter), plus speed throttling at ~3 Mbps down plus a bit of overprovisioning. Upload speeds don't appear to be throttled; was seeing 6-7 Mbps, which iirc is about right for this particular location.

Yea you do have to restart to save changes. Tmobile roaming is not throttled, I've seen as high as 100mbps on tmobile but to be honest it's rare and tmobile is mostly slow in my area. We have band 25ca which usually blows away t-mobile band 4

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2 minutes ago, JLevoLTE said:

Yea you do have to restart to save changes. Tmobile roaming is not throttled, I've seen as high as 100mbps on tmobile but to be honest it's rare and tmobile is mostly slow in my area. We have band 25ca which usually blows away t-mobile band 4

Huh. I'll have to do some more testing. I know TMo can hit 100+ Mbps in some places here, though where I'm sitting right now isn't one of those places. The relative speed test consistency I saw across B2 and B4 made me thin there's throttling going on, at least in this market, but I may be wrong.

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19 hours ago, iansltx said:

Huh. I'll have to do some more testing. I know TMo can hit 100+ Mbps in some places here, though where I'm sitting right now isn't one of those places. The relative speed test consistency I saw across B2 and B4 made me thin there's throttling going on, at least in this market, but I may be wrong.

Sprint traffic is prioritized behind T-Mobile traffic. That could be the cause of some of what you're seeing. 

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On 1/10/2019 at 10:57 AM, burnout8488 said:

T-mobile used to be full speed when my phone would roam on it. Seems like users on reddit are reporting throttling as of late too. I've noticed this - it's unbearably slow now. 

All roaming data on TMO go through Sprint servers in a few locations. These Sprint servers have a finite capacity, as more and more phones are able to roam, the speeds for people roaming will go down.

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On 1/10/2019 at 6:43 PM, RAvirani said:

Sprint traffic is prioritized behind T-Mobile traffic. That could be the cause of some of what you're seeing. 

I'm pretty sure they have put into place some throttling after a period of uncapped speeds. I can no longer get anything above 3-4 Mpbs down anywhere I've been roaming on T-Mobile in the San Diego area. I have the same experience that upload seems to be uncapped and I get 30-50 Mpbs up+. This is on a cell that I get 100+ down with my T-Mobile SIM card in the same place on the same phone. I feel like deprioritization isn't that uniform usually in a whole area.

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17 hours ago, Thomas L. said:

I'm pretty sure they have put into place some throttling after a period of uncapped speeds. I can no longer get anything above 3-4 Mpbs down anywhere I've been roaming on T-Mobile in the San Diego area. I have the same experience that upload seems to be uncapped and I get 30-50 Mpbs up+. This is on a cell that I get 100+ down with my T-Mobile SIM card in the same place on the same phone. I feel like deprioritization isn't that uniform usually in a whole area.

Sprint customers do not get access to all towers or all bands on a tower.
There are towers where we only get access to one band, even though the tower has 3 bands.

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Was in Mission Beach the other day.  Notorious for slow to unusable Sprint LTE.   I started roaming on T-Mobile roaming and zoom......  wayyyy faster.  Yes, it was just as fast when I turned WiFi off so that I was just using LTE.  I forgot to get that screenshot.  

 

 

Screenshot_20190122-190900_Speedtest.jpg

Screenshot_20190122-194329_Speedtest.jpg

Screenshot_20190122-185959_SignalCheck Pro.jpg

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Indeed in the Pacific Beach/ La Jolla area, there are many sites which have slow backhaul and or B25 only... Some in places where b41 would really benefit... Lots of small cells popping up in San Diego though, many coming online everyday.  T mobile is terrible for me all over San Diego, Sprint generally shines for me where I travel in town.

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The throttling isn't just on T-Mobile. It's on US Cellular as well. Typically a US Cellular phone will clock around 20Mbps, my Sprint phone limits too less than 3Mbps. Does the same on a brand new recently updated and retrofitted former iWireless tower in Centerville, IA, where I'm able to get around 25-30Mbps on a T-Mobile phone and less than 3Mbps on my Sprint one sitting right next too it. And in both cases my Sprint phone is newer, and more capable of faster speeds. So it wouldn't make since if it was the device. I also had the same limitation when I had Virgin Mobile Inner Circle, the same 3Mbps cap throttle. Couldn't use T-Mobile as the tower didn't get upgraded till late December 2018, I switched to Sprint early December.

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The throttling isn't just on T-Mobile. It's on US Cellular as well. Typically a US Cellular phone will clock around 20Mbps, my Sprint phone limits too less than 3Mbps. Does the same on a brand new recently updated and retrofitted former iWireless tower in Centerville, IA, where I'm able to get around 25-30Mbps on a T-Mobile phone and less than 3Mbps on my Sprint one sitting right next too it. And in both cases my Sprint phone is newer, and more capable of faster speeds. So it wouldn't make since if it was the device. I also had the same limitation when I had Virgin Mobile Inner Circle, the same 3Mbps cap throttle. Couldn't use T-Mobile as the tower didn't get upgraded till late December 2018, I switched to Sprint early December.
Perhaps T-Mobile or US Cellular is restricting the bands available, and not allowing carrier aggregation. It's also possible that T-Mobile or US Cellular is deprioritizing roaming on their congested sites, rather than Sprint throttling it. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if providers gave priority to their own customers over roaming UEs.

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk

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6 hours ago, ingenium said:

Perhaps T-Mobile or US Cellular is restricting the bands available, and not allowing carrier aggregation. It's also possible that T-Mobile or US Cellular is deprioritizing roaming on their congested sites, rather than Sprint throttling it. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if providers gave priority to their own customers over roaming UEs.

Sent from my Pixel 3 XL using Tapatalk
 

Deprioritizarion would be the first thing that comes to mind.

USCC doesn't place band restrictions on Sprint roaming, although T-Mobile does. 

I'm not 100% sure about carrier aggregation. 

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I disabled B26, B26, and B41 and picked up B4. 30 down, 13 up so the speeds are definitely good. Im in an area that is somewhere between b26 or 3g depending on which side of the house you stand on. Sprint LTE speeds are about 15 down 7 up, tops here when you get a good connection upstairs. 

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8 hours ago, TheSupervisor said:

I disabled B26, B26, and B41 and picked up B4. 30 down, 13 up so the speeds are definitely good. Im in an area that is somewhere between b26 or 3g depending on which side of the house you stand on. Sprint LTE speeds are about 15 down 7 up, tops here when you get a good connection upstairs. 

Have you applied for a Magic Box?

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3 hours ago, TheSupervisor said:

You mean one of these??

No, I havent but I probably should. I have wifi and decent voice coverage so I have never looked into it. 

20190130_124712.jpg

Magic boxes help when LTE is weak. They don't impact CDMA service. This could be helpful if you transition to VoLTE for calls in the future.

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