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Holy crap, go Nokia: Nokia touted a new lab achievement over Sprint’s 2.5 GHz spectrum that boosted 5G capacity by up to four times through a software upgrade. The test included a software upgrade of E-UTRAN New Radio – Dual Connectivity (EN-DC) and Multi-User-MIMO (MU-MIMO) using Sprint’s mid-band 5G spectrum and Nokia’s AirScale solution to deliver 3 Gbps total downlink cell throughput, in what Nokia called a first. It showcased Nokia’s AirScale Dual Mode Massive MIMO for 5G and LTE, using a single radio unit for both LTE and 5G. The test also tapped commercial hotspot devices. Nokia said once its service is commercially available operators will be able to “vastly increase” network capacity through software updates to the base station, without the need to invest in more spectrum or require site visits to swap out hardware or transport. https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/nokia-notches-5g-capacity-boost-via-software-upgrade

Seems like Saw will be part of New T-Mobile! https://newtmobile.com/senior-leadership-team/ JOHN SAW EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF ADVANCED AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

I knew this day was coming, and yet it's still a bit heartbreaking now that it's finally here. Sprint had some ups and downs. The most positive thing I can remember against the other three was the old Google voice integration. Largest negative would be the VoLTE rollout. It was a blast going through Wimax, the LTE launch, triband LTE, and then finally 5G NR. Getting to have tower maps through S4GRU was a huge part of the experience. It definitely wouldn't have been the same without this place. A big thanks to everyone at S4GRU over the years, and I hope the transition goes as well as it can for all the current Sprint employees.

Here we go!!! T-Mobile and Sprint are finally merging: What you need to know about the $26.5 billion deal

T-Mobile has asked the FCC for a temporary authority to use Sprint's 2.5 GHz spectrum in advance of the merger close. They want to use it for 5G NR. https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/t-mobile-seeks-ok-to-use-2-5-ghz-philadelphia

In this area (DC), at least, the Massive MIMO gear has continued to go online. I can see it in the MLS data. - Trip

You could be right, however, most of us members on S4GRU have used Sprint for years. We were not users of T-Mobile. Do we really know how many screw-ups they had combining other networks? We were not there using it.

Wow! It’s happening!

Cheeky California. Gotta have their fingers in everything.

T-Mobile & Sprint have had 2 years to plan the network integration. If they have not figured out what to do in each site down to the size screws to use I would be severely disappointed.

Beta version 4.582b has been pushed out, but I am not sure how long it will take before it appears on devices. Google is warning that app processing may take up to 7 days (presumably due to the COVID-19 pandemic). This update only attempts to resolve the stale LTE data problem that some users are seeing on Android 10 devices. Some code changes have been made that MAY resolve the issue -- please test it out and see if it works. If you are still seeing the same behavior with this update, I added a more drastic code change as an option under Preferences > General > Use Stale Data Workaround. Enable that option and see what changes. Please do not enable this option until you try monitoring the app for a reasonable period of time with it disabled. I don't love the "fix" I created that gets enabled with that option, but it may be necessary. Of course, neither approach might fix it. Please share your results in this thread, or privately however you normally contact me. Sending feedback within a diagnostic report is always acceptable, as that comes with background data that might be useful to me. Thank you! EDIT: It's already live as of 8:15pm EDT

Agreed. T-Mobile knows how to execute network integrations pretty well. I’m looking forward to T-Mobile putting some real capex behind these spectrum holdings. Both networks are getting what sounds like a top to bottom review, site by site, and T-Mobile will be able to pick and choose the best site placements and equipment to have on each. It’s going to be a killer network. Verizon and AT&T have every reason to be worried.

T-Mobile Sprint Merger can proceed per California California's Becerra will hold a press conference (@12:30 ET) Wednesday to announce a settlement with the companies. and from another report / news source: US News and World Report T- Mobile Sprint Merger

You are aware that those are all community aggregated and not actual data? Just checked my area and it is extremely underrepresented from sites I know of. You should definitely take that map with a huge salt lick

Praying here you stay cough-less and working as far as that goes Robert.

I just have that "GUT" feeling that it is not going to be as easy as they think to combine the TMobile and Sprint sites. I hope they do not cause issues due to mistakes when they attempt this. I just see some problems jumping up.

https://investor.t-mobile.com/news-and-events/t-mobile-us-press-releases/press-release-details/2020/T-Mobile-is-Financially-Prepared-to-Close-the-Sprint-Merger/default.aspx

SC user checking in, can confirm this is legit.

Sprint TACs have changed to match T-Mobile TACs. This is a prerequisite for MOCN. So they might roll that out soon after the merger completes. Would basically merge the radio part of the networks, but keep the cores separate. Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk

For our customers: Today, Sprint signed FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s Keep Americans Connected Pledge. For the next 60 days, we will support our residential and small business customers by: Not terminating service if they are unable to pay their Sprint bill because of the coronavirus, and Waiving late fees incurred because of economic circumstances related to the pandemic. Starting on Tuesday, customers with international long distance calling plans will receive complimentary international calling rates from the U.S. to countries defined by the CDC as Level 3. By next Thursday: Customers with metered data plans will receive unlimited data per month for 60 days (a minimum of two bill cycles) at no extra cost. We will provide customers with an additional 20GB of mobile hotspot data per month for 60 days (a minimum of two bill cycles) at no extra cost. Coming soon: Customers with mobile hotspot-capable handsets who don’t have mobile hotspot today will now get 20GB as well per month for 60 days (a minimum of two bill cycles) at no extra cost.

It seems like Sprint has been doing a lot of work for 5G but has been holding back on announcing any new cities. I have a strong feeling that when they announce that the merger is complete, the new T-Mobile will start announcing a lot of these cities and take credit.

Wow I cannot believe it, Sprint as we all know it is over. A end to a era. Looking back at it all, it was really a ride but a fun one at that in retrospect. We’ve definitely created a bond and community here. S4GRU was/still is one my favorite forums to be on. Even though we all will be under a new brand and stuff. I hope that this forum as we know it will not go away. I thank Sprint for the highs and lows but more so everyone who has participated on here for the past few years! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

If you go down the page a bit it says this: Our Community is currently set to Read Only due the pandemic's affect on our staffing . Please try Searching the Community, we have many questions already answered, you can also check out the Knowledge base If you need immediate assistance please visit Sprint Chat

System Project Leader in finance for both Elmhurst and Queens Hospital (the ones in the news) here in NYC. Also considered essential. It Be safe everyone.

I am an "essential" employee and having to work a lot right now. I hope things will settle down in the next week or so and I can do some work around here. If I develop a cough, I'll get sent home. Robert

Failure is not an option. It would be best to limit change to only those areas where there is very little risk at this time. If New T-Mobile messes up the network integration (looking at you Sprint Network Vision) in the middle of this virus crisis, there will be hell to pay. Large numbers of people are dependent on their mobile phones, hot spots, and internet data connections right now for work, school, news, shopping, entertainment and just to keep contact with work, friends and family while they are stuck in their homes. If connectivity breaks, they can no longer communicate with the outside world. They also cannot run to a New T-Mobile store to get a bad software push to their mobile phone fixed right now so they better be careful with changes on the mobile device side of the network.

I've been with Sprint since 2000. T-Mobile's integration of Metro (former CDMA) was considered to be a huge success. I can tell you though, that I've been through Nextel buyout and the famous (not in a positive way) Network Vision, and countless promises of "a better network", so many "Projects" planned and started and very few of them completed. Dr Saw is probably the best head of network Sprint has had in some time. He's going to T-Mo too. I too have heard through tower engineer friend that T-Mo has been buying and storing Massive mimo units for a while... and fully plans on using them when the network conversion starts. I'd say give T-Mo some time to actually start before doubting them. We don't really know their latest plan. I am looking forward to hearing this and much more news, hopefully beginning Wednesday.

Curious how quickly T-Mobile management will act on things.

I'm starting to see my 5G mapping show up on CellMapper. I'm still surprised by how little N5 is active in Louisville, especially considering how many sites should be capable based on B5 LTE added during the recent upgrades. I thought it was just a firmware update to switch from B5 to N5. Only a handful of sites even have the 5G indicator, and of those only a smaller group are actually broadcasting N5. The good part is that as long as the adjacent sites have been upgraded it will keep the N5 connection while connected to LTE from another site. Map of Louisville: I've seen the 5G indicator whenever a site has "Support" for the UPPERLAYER_IND_R15 field in the Service Mode screen. It will not show when connected to a non-anchor LTE band. For N5 its B2, B4(B66), and B30 as the anchor bands. N260 adds B12 as an anchor band. I'll have to do some more in depth testing to see how much N5 is contributing speed wise, the sites I've tested so far I don't really have any before data to compare to. My phone (S20 Ultra) doesn't seem to have any trouble initially connecting to and staying connected to N5, and it seems to want to hang on to a tower that supports it longer before handing off to the next tower at times. I have noticed NR PCIs high into the 900s, vs LTE PCIs that didn't go much higher than 500. MM-Wave testing SO far I've only found N260 on one site in Louisville. Looks like an Ericsson M-MIMO panel. I was wondering if it would be on all of the small cells they are throwing up everywhere but so far they're still only B2/B46 LTE. I wasn't able to test range much in the below example as its downtown around lots of buildings and bridges. Luckily there is a McDonald's right next to the tower, so that is where this testing is from. Disclosure: I was going for best case scenario for testing. I had the case off and was holding it out my window to get the best signal. But I did connect to it just fine in my truck with the windows up and case still on for the first test. The first round of tests were done at 6:30pm on March 13th. I had the opportunity to test this site again at 1:30am last Sunday morning from the same spot to see the difference from a high traffic time to a low traffic time: Ping was consistently around 14-15ms

The "Extended" alpha tag comes from the PRL Sprint loads onto phones. Note that PRLs are only necessary (or relevant) for CDMA connectivity. On most all devices, the carrier name displayed is the voice carrier. Previously, Sprint only roamed on 1x for voice. Accordingly, whether using Sprint or a roaming partner for voice, the PRL always dictated that the alpha tag should read "Sprint" or "Extended" (or "Roaming" a very long time ago when on an international CDMA network). With the recent switch to WCDMA/HSPA voice roaming (which is the default now), the PRL is no longer in play, and the alpha tag reads what the roaming network dictates.

T-Mobile and Sprint are nearing a close on their merger deal, and are poised to pool their respective spectrum resources. Together they’ll have high-band 47 GHz spectrum covering most of the country, and appeared to have picked up licenses in adjacent markets. Combined, T-Mobile and Sprint are licensed to provide service using 47 GHz spectrum to 95% of the U.S. population (315,331,464 people), according to Goemmer. How about that....

I can also confirm this is happening.

Hopefully they would STOP holding Sprint Customers onto LTE at extremely bad levels and allow the connection to T-Mobile LTE if it is better. Holding onto poor LTE at -120 to -130 levels does nothing but aggravate users and raise their blood pressure.

Of the 18 executive positions only 4 will be former Sprint executives: Deeanne King, chief human resources officer for Sprint (NYSE: S), will hold the same position in the New T-Mobile. The 30-year-plus Sprint employee also will have the title of executive vice president and report directly to Sievert. Nestor Cano, Sprint’s COO, will be executive vice president of integration and transformation and a strategic adviser to Sievert. Dow Draper will be executive vice president of emerging products, reporting to Sievert. Draper has had a number of roles with Sprint, including chief commercial officer and leader of the carrier’s prepaid services. John Saw, who led Sprint’s network efforts, will be executive vice president of advanced and emerging technologies for the merged company. He will report to Neville Ray, president of technology at T-Mobile and the New T-Mobile. https://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2020/03/12/leadership-of-new-t-mobile-will-include-few.html?ana=yahoo&yptr=yahoo

They have been preparing for this merger for 2 years. They know in minute detail what exactly needs to happen in every site, how to migrate each and every customer. They have had dry runs and know where the difficulties lie. They have added fields in the data bases to accommodate differences in customer info and plans. Knowing all the prep work that was put in it, I am thinking 2 years instead of 3.

That's commiefornia for you.

How do you like the last bullet point of the California's Attn Gen: Reimburse California and other coalition states up to $15 million for the costs of the investigation and litigation challenging the merger. We sue you, we loose and you pay!?! Politics at it's best! I don't think T Mo should have to pay for their stubbornness.

I really do hate California.

Getting more info from a few other people, it sounds like it's definitely limited to some Android 10 devices, and everything continues to update normally *except* signal metrics and cell ID details for the active LTE cell. LTE neighbors, CDMA info, and Wi-Fi are apparently working normally. If anyone is seeing something different, please let me know! I'm still working on finding a solution.

I may have found a band-aid fix that will resolve the import/export issue temporarily. New beta release is processing and should be available on Google Play within the next hour or so. I also decided to unveil some very basic 5G data, although I do not expect many devices to see it yet. It will appear below the LTE information if there is any data available; please send a diagnostic report if you see it!

The phone comes with a screen protector pre-installed. It's not tempered glass but it's pretty good and I'd honestly refrain from removing it/switching it out unless it gets scratched up quite a bit.

Sprint has about 45,000 macro sites, T-Mobile 65,000 and Verizon and AT&T 85,000 each approximately.

FINALLY the Sprint Note 9 gets Android 10 and VoLTE!!

It's almost like satellite internet is complete trash.

Hey everyone, I wanted to share something that I've been working on. I bought a Fibocom 850GL from eBay (the HP version) for about $30. My original intention was to create a DIY Portable Mobile Hotspot with a Raspberry Pi acting as the router and a TP Link WR902ac for a fast WiFi AP. I got two Cradlepoint antennas (I didn't trust any cheap ones on eBay/Amazon) that is rated to pickup 2.5 GHz and put the modem in an enclosure that converts from M.2 to USB 3.0 with a SIM slot. You can see it all together held by rubber bands (there is also a 20,000 mAh battery underneath it all): It worked great! I installed OpenWRT on the RPi and configured it to get a cellular data connection. I used it for a few weeks taking it around town and it was stable. However data speeds weren't as fast as it should be (about 42 Mbps). I initially thought it was the antennas but after some digging around I figured out a way to fix it. To keep it brief, abrasive on GitHub figured out how to change USB modes with an AT command. I tried changing the USB mode to 7 which allows it to work in Windows using CDC MBIM (before it wouldn't work in Windows). To my surprise it worked, and without any drivers! Best of all, I'm seeing much better data speeds almost upwards of 120 Mbps download. The modem supports 3xCA on B41. From here, I haven't gotten much further. I'd like to put this modem in a real router using PCIe instead of USB but I'm unsure about compatibility and drivers when looking some up. Now why this modem? You can activate it on Sprint as a "tablet" which costs $15/month after auto pay (the HP version only) for unlimited data. Also as a side note, right now I deactivated it. Should I reactivate it again because of the merger and the plan not being available? I don't need this but it's pretty cool to have.

This morning, my phone roamed on T-Mobile via the 310260 PLMN instead of 311490. But it was still restricted to PCS and did not roam on 700. - Trip

There's no signal or cell ID info being reported, but I found a different approach to try.. unfortunately it doesn't give anything useful other than a status flag. Not convinced it's entirely accurate yet, but that's where you guys come in!

Got the update on my V50. I got da 5Gs! [emoji23] I think by the time I sent the diag report I might have dropped to LTE. I didn't see any 5G in the diag data. Then again, I didn't see that section at all until you pointed it out to me. [emoji16]

I know this isn't the ultra, but 20X on the S20+ is pretty impressive (I know it's still fuzzy, but considering the distance, it's pretty clear). 30X is hard to control handheld. I can not imagine the 100X hand held on the Ultra..... 1x: 20X:

I don't know how much it matters to people but one of the things I'm looking forward to about these phones over my S10+ is the location of the NFC reader. On the S10+ it's in the middle of the phone on the back but on all of the S20's it's at the top of the phone. It sounds stupid but if you've ever used iPhones for Apple Pay or even the Note 10, you'll understand that having the location of the NFC reader at the top of the phone makes it much easier to tap your phone for payments or public transportation. I'll no longer have to adjust my grip to pay by phone.