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Official Tmobile-Sprint merger discussion thread


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1 hour ago, tremendousjohnson said:

If that happens, it'll be interesting to see what a bankruptcy would look like.  Who gets Dish's spectrum?  This whole deal was structured to make sure ATT, Tmobile and Verzion don't get bigger.  Grab your popcorn.....

Bankruptcy could take years. Many painful years.  Now is the time to surrender to a white knight while it can still be saved.  Dish basically seems paralyzed.  Plenty of rational ways to improve cash flow. Start with Ergen not being the CEO.

 

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Re: Dish, cable providers still exist. Comcast/Charter probably wouldn't mind instantly having a nationwide network to drastically improve their economics, and their existing agreement with VZW could be swapped to roaming, so a cable network SIM would suddenly have better coverage than any other carrier. Samsung is a vendor to both Dish and Charter/Comcast so n48 strand mount overlays in areas that need it could be deferred thanks to n70, but would integrate reasonably well with the Samsung macro gear.

That, or Amazon buys.

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On the T-Mobile side of things, as of probably 9:20am this morning Austin is now 100+80 MHz n41; B41 is now gone. I can now hit 750ish Mbps indoors a half mile from the cell site, and wouldn't be surprised to break 1.5 Gbps closer/outside.

So TMo now has 10x10 n25 + 15x15 n71 + 100+80 n41 here, for a total of 230 MHz 5G. With the C-Band they'll have 270.

Re: 800, the band class is wrong for anything other than B26 LTE and n26 NR. Though I wouldn't be surprised if T-Mobile could throw Ericsson and Nokia enough cash to add band 26 support to their existing gear, so we *could* see B/n26 come back if there's nothing better to do with the spectrum. B26 probably makes more sense as that would allow for dropping B71 LTE everywhere with negligible coverage drops.

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2 minutes ago, iansltx said:

Re: 800, the band class is wrong for anything other than B26 LTE and n26 NR. Though I wouldn't be surprised if T-Mobile could throw Ericsson and Nokia enough cash to add band 26 support to their existing gear, so we *could* see B/n26 come back if there's nothing better to do with the spectrum. B26 probably makes more sense as that would allow for dropping B71 LTE everywhere with negligible coverage drops.

Iirc T-Mobile is supposed to try to sell it first. I think IOT would be a good use case. The question with trying to replace b71 LTE is how many phones can support it? 

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In Zanesville OH, With 50Mhz n41, gave me 45/30 yesterday outside the courthouse. They should now have 138.5 contiguous n41 now, which should make a significant difference.

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7 hours ago, dkyeager said:

Iirc T-Mobile is supposed to try to sell it first. I think IOT would be a good use case. The question with trying to replace b71 LTE is how many phones can support it? 

IOT would be a decent use case, assuming it'd run on B26 LTE.

As for replacing B71 LTE, if B26 phone support isn't a superset of 71, it's super close, with another bunch of phones that support 26 but not 71. Recall that 71 was tricky to add in at first due to antenna design issues, IIRC impacting phone size, so even now B26 is probably slightly more common than B71 on phones that aren't specifically made for T-Mobile.

And then there are markets that have <= 15 Mz of 600 (e.g. here) where B71 has already been retired, so bringing B26 (back) online would represent a straight-up capacity increase, plus indoor strain relief for B12 when necessary on voice...'cuz we *still* don't have VoNR here.

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On 3/1/2024 at 2:47 PM, Paynefanbro said:

Nope they're not using it but it could be used for n26 or Band 26.

I saw T-Mobile running B26 LTE in northeast Colorado this weekend driving between Omaha and Denver. I have no idea why.... but it was there.

20 hours ago, though said:

What markets might be effected?

Most markets are affected to some degree, more rural areas where Sprint/Clear didn't focus on WiMax/B41 seeing the biggest boost. 

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44 minutes ago, Dkoellerwx said:

I saw T-Mobile running B26 LTE in northeast Colorado this weekend driving between Omaha and Denver. I have no idea why.... but it was there.

Most markets are affected to some degree, more rural areas where Sprint/Clear didn't focus on WiMax/B41 seeing the biggest boost. 

I've seen it running on Sprint keep sites but not on T-Mobile sites. That's super interesting!

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1 hour ago, Paynefanbro said:

I've seen it running on Sprint keep sites but not on T-Mobile sites. That's super interesting!

They're running it on selected sites as protection sites to keep the licenses alive.  I've found a handful of them floating around.

- Trip

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B26 is data only on two sites here in Ohio. Calls will hangup on first ring.

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I may take my Air 3 and grab some pics of the tower that I live a mile away from, just for curiosity.  I am sure there is a more appropriate place to post pics like that, if I do grab them.. or would this be the best thread?

Hasn't quite been a year since Tmo colocated with AT&T on that particular tower that I'm referring to.. Been wondering what equipment they installed (I get b71 along with a couple other frequencies.. I'll get more details later on freqs).

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On 3/3/2024 at 9:02 PM, jonathanm1978 said:

I may take my Air 3 and grab some pics of the tower that I live a mile away from, just for curiosity.  I am sure there is a more appropriate place to post pics like that, if I do grab them.. or would this be the best thread?

Here is probably fine, or you could use the Alabama thread if you want, hasn't had a ton of activity lately.

 

 

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3 hours ago, schmidtj said:

Now we have our timeliness which is as expected: "over the next few days, covering nearly 60 million customers".  The other 20 million customers will happen as they build out towers.

 

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Not sure if this is similar for anyone else but since they expanded the second n41 carrier, if I bandlock to n41 SA only then my phone will often camp on the second carrier. This makes it possible to map for the first time. 

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36 minutes ago, PedroDaGr8 said:

Not sure if this is similar for anyone else but since they expanded the second n41 carrier, if I bandlock to n41 SA only then my phone will often camp on the second carrier. This makes it possible to map for the first time. 

I noticed that here as well, i never saw the 2nd carrier as pcc prior to widening it to 80MHz. 

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Wonder how they will handle greater than 100Mhz in rural areas?  They could do LTE CA, but considering most of the phones are 5g this likely makes little sense.

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1 hour ago, dkyeager said:

Wonder how they will handle greater than 100Mhz in rural areas?  They could do LTE CA, but considering most of the phones are 5g this likely makes little sense.

Rural Nebraska sites had 100+40 before the spectrum was allocated, I'm sure they'll put it all into n41 as they never bothered to but B41 on the expansion sites out here. 

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10 hours ago, Dkoellerwx said:

Rural Nebraska sites had 100+40 before the spectrum was allocated, I'm sure they'll put it all into n41 as they never bothered to but B41 on the expansion sites out here. 

Another possibility is to divide up NSA and SA with one getting 100MHz and the other getting 80MHz or the remainder. Some people on Reddit have reported seeing this.  I may have seen it, but did not test it well enough to comment yet.

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