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Fist Fight

Green Bean

The available channel pool is not that large.  It is not quite as simple as you think -- because of frequency reuse.

 

For example, the New York City and Philadelphia markets generally cannot use the same channels.  Otherwise, the central New Jersey suburbs in between would get nothing but co channel interference.  Thus, that cuts the available channel pool at least in half.

 

AJ

I realize this. I was figuring about 1/3 of the channels would be useable in a given market. That leaves roughly 12/13 OTA HD channels in a market. Plus most of them can do an additional sub channel or two within their spectrum. I think my perspective is also a product of geography. There is plenty of channel space in my neck of the woods!

Any TV license issued since the mid-90s was won at auction.  Any older ones that have changed hands have included spectrum value in the purchase price.

 

Although the licenses were "free" they came with lots of public service obligations and regulations, which wireless doesn't have.  Wireless isn't required to provide local programming, educational content for kids, provide its service for free to the general public, etc. 

 

- Trip

I didn't realize newer TV licenses were being auctioned, I can't imagine they have much monitary value outside of spectrum constrained markets. My point is that if you are merely relocating their license, as opposed to simply just taking it, then they should be only be compensated for the cost of moving. AFAICT, outside of NYC and LA, moving to "only" 38 OTA TV channels shouldn't result in a loss of stations.

Mr. Mister

I keep saying this, but many do not believe me.  Barring government use of eminent domain, this 600 MHz incentive auction may never happen -- at least, not in any substantial form.  It has all the makings of a stalemate between the FCC and broadcasters.  After all, just clearing that minimal example of 50 MHz of spectrum plus guard bands would require taking approximately 10 channels off the air in a given market.  I can easily envision markets in which even less than 50 MHz of spectrum would come available for auction.  The idea that broadcasters will relinquish upwards of 100 MHz just seems like a pipe dream.

 

AJ

I'm fine with incentive auctions in theory. But the broadcasters were GIVEN the spectrum, they didn't buy it like a wireless carrier. Why should the broadcasters get any money from this deal, they never paid money for it in the first place. I wish they'd just vacate eveything above channel 38, pay the broadcasters relocation costs, and do the auction. It would avoid messy band and interferance issues.

I'd also like to see them eventually rework the original 50Mhz of Cellular spectrum into 5 5x5Mhz licenses. The current owners of the A and B licenses would get 2 licenses each, with an ownership limit of 3 licenses per CMA. That would leave 1 (or 2) new license(s) that could be sold in each CMA.

Yea and sadly they got more spectrum from uscc spectrum deal. But then lose uscc coverage from chicago, all the way down to saint louis for roaming. So now I don't blame them for using uscc towers, so they don't have to pay verizon.I am sure uscc is giving sprint a nice leasing deal on the towers too, seeing how they are losing money on the towers(dead asset). Since, now they basically they don't use the cell site. We have a uscc turning into sprint site in the chicago(filling in a nice gap were coverage is poor too) and hopefully have more coming soon.

Did USCC actually own those towers/poles? Most wireless providers try to sell them and lease them back from a company in the tower business.

Now that the CDMA coverage project is finished, will sprint add lte only macro cells as they're densifying for move to volte?

I wouldn't say CDMA coverage is completely finished. As we have discussed in other locations on this forum, Sprint still has markets where it needs to build native coverage in order to protect its PCS G license (MT, ND, SD, NE, and WY); plus, Sprint will continue to add new coverage where towns have outgrown Sprint's coverage, or other areas where Sprint sees high roaming useage (particularly on VZW). But I take your point, almost all of Sprint's existing CDMA sites have been upgraded.

Sprint does have LTE only sites (old Clearwire sites) and will continue to add them in metropolitan areas to improve data performance. But in areas where Sprint wants to build new coverage footprint, I don't see them building LTE only sites. They will get the NV1.0 equipment that does both CDMA and LTE.

The problem with Us Cell Is I only get 500 mb on roaming and 3g at the very best. Since they got bought out by Sprint in the BN area I've been looking to switch to a different carrier. Thinking now sprint is my best option. By the way nice to meet you all.

It is widely known/assumed that Sprint gets significantly more favorable roaming rates from USCC and other smaller providers than it gets from Verizon. My point was that it may not have been economical to build out an area when it was covered by USCC, but once you have to pay Verizon's roaming rates, then the calculation may change.

This - I believe was one of the old USCC towers. There are multiple spottings scattered around north central IL in rural areas of USCC equipment coming down and full-build Sprint equipment going up. None live up here yet - I'm sure it's just a matter of time.

It makes sense. At one time it was probably more economical to roam on USCC. Now that they are stuck with Verizon roaming, it probably makes more sense to build out. Also, now they can have USCC customers roaming on Sprint, which helps even out roaming revenue.

I would have been sad a few years ago when they actually carried a lot of electronics, capacitors, relays, connectors, etc. - but over the past couple of years they have steadily gotten rid of those sorts of things and replaced them with overpriced accessories and things that aren't really hard to find elsewhere. It would be nice if they made it, but at this point I don't know who they cater to.

 

Tommy

They just opened a new RS store in my town, and it does in fact have a selection of some of the more basic electronics stuff. They are still trying to sell cell phones too, but they have gone "back to basics" a little bit. I don't know how that is going to work out for them.

Once the ibez is cleared and b26 deployed nationwide why should volte be further delayed

Because cdma to LTE VOLTE is mostly undeveloped and has a ton of issues that must be fixed.

 

Ecsfb handoffs and ehrpd aren't the most reliable thing ever for cdma and LTE handoff operations.

Sprint has said that they are in less of a hurry to roll out VoLTE than the other wireless providers, due to their investment in 1xA equipment as part of NV. They are going to take the time to do it right and make sure they don't have compatibility issues with other CCA/RRPP members. Basically, they elected to let the other wireless providers go first, and deal with most of the bugs and compatibility issues. And why shouldn't they? They have the newest and most efficient CDMA equipment, whereas Verizon is just going to let their old 3G network slowly rot away once they roll out VoLTE. Heck, they have already started to ignore all but the most serious problems with their 3G network.

I'm speaking of the CDMA/3GPP2 royalties. Those could be reduced.

I thought Qualcomm had basically stopped charging a premium for CDMA capability. Thought the Qualcomm pitch was now something like "you can buy from no-name semiconductor over there, or you can pay only a few pennies more and get a genuine Qualcomm chip, and as a bonus, it is also CDMA capable."

Sprint is not eliminating pcs CDMA in 4 years. Verizon is keeping CDMA until 2020 but they have the luxury of having bc0 850mhz so they'll shutdown pcs CDMA soon.

Sprint doesn't have bc0 spectrum and has current customers with pcs 1x and if they're pushed off it they may just switch to Tmobile or att wcdma m2m.

Sprint just launched 1x800 recently so I don't think there's even many m2m modules.

I said 3-4 years from when they roll out VoLTE, not 3-4 years from today, I agree they won't kill CDMA before VZ, that would be crazy given the investment they made in CDMA. I don't expect to see a Sprint VoLTE rollout until almost 2017, maybe mid-late 2016 at the earliest, given their statements on the matter.  So basically I don't expect to see PCS CDMA completely eliminated until well into the 2020s. I think you might see Sprint squeeze their CDMA traffic into a single 5x5 PCS block of spectrum before then (a single 1xA carrier and 2 EVDO in PCS), but I don't seem them TOTALLY shutting it down until 80-90% of customers have VoLTE phones (and the remainder have BC10 capable phones or M2M modules).

If there's anyone here that wishes the Sprint platform was more standard, it would be me. It just wasn't/isn't possible until the VoLTE era. I'd rather see Sprint skate to where the puck is going over where it is now.

I think we will get there eventually. Once Sprint starts moving to VoLTE, I imagine they will convert PCS entirely to LTE within 3-4 years. The only place I see them keeping CDMA in the next decade will be on that sliver of 1x800 that is too small for anything usefull except one (or two) 1xA carrier(s). Those 1xA carriers can provide a LOT of voice or M2M capacity.

Electronics hobbyists have long since moved online...

 

http://www.monoprice.com/Category?c_id=102

 

AJ

I think there is still room for a local store to carry electronic stuff if you are in a big enough market. Sometimes your really want/need something right now.

I guess to me that sale just never made full sense to me, why they would sell there home market, might of well of just sold everything to Sprint, but that didnt happen obviously lol. 

USCC had its headquarters in Chicago, but Chicago was never really a big market for them. They didn't have a very good spectrum position there. They lacked a cellular spectrum license that they have in most markets. The spectrum they held there was PCS only and was acquired as part of a divestment and they didn't have enough spectrum there to launch a 4G network.

Here's my 'wishlist' of network tweaks I hope Sprint will accomplish by the end of next year:

4. Deploy carrier aggregation on SMR and PCS in addition to BRS/EBS

 

Hopefully at least most of these will happen. That said I'm confident Sprint will make the right decisions with new management.

 

Edit: These are not in any specific order.

I hope they don't do carrier aggregation with band 26. They need to keep that free for people that don't have a band 25 or 41 signal. If they want to aggregate multiple 5x5 blocks within band 25 that would be great though.

American Cheese.

How many CDMA (voice and data) carriers does Sprint deploy on a site typically? Am I correct in recalling that each CDMA carrier is 1.25 Mhz?

I don't think there is a "typical" number. It depends on the amount of traffic on a site. At the minimum on old sites you'd have a 1x carrier for voice and an EVDO carrier.

I thought TD-LTE was an international standard and not one created by China?

TD-LTE is but your handset may or may not support whatever band they are using for TD-LTE.

TD-SCDMA is the wierd China only mobile standard that is being slowly abandoned for UMTS/WCDMA and LTE.

What speeds should be expected from band 41? I see all these people getting 40-70 MBPS, and I've never seen that from band 41 even with full bars on my iPhone 6.

That assumes you have decent signal and are on a tower with enough backhaul. Many Clearwire sites don't have the proper backhaul to support those speeds yet.

I just got off the phone with web sales, 8007774681.They would not take full payment. Would only sell on contract or Easy pay. My only guess is that they would try and stick you with the web discount ($320) if you left Sprint within 24 months. They were evasive when I asked about this possibility. Which could have been language barrier since they did seem from India by there accent. I'm confused. Also on more than one occasion in the call he asked what I planned on doing with the phone.

I think you CAN pay off an easypay phone early ... so that might be a good workaround.

So, I know this doesn't exactly fit in here, but I don't feel it warrants its own thread.

 

Our market (Milwaukee market) has been NV complete for some time now.  However, yesterday it seems they did a huge "update" to the address given from the 1x site.  Most addresses were spot on, and are now in some cases 5 miles away from their real location.

 

Has this been happening anywhere else?  Here in the Madison area everything just went bonkers! 

I noticed the same thing on here (Western Minnesota in the Dakotas market).

It used to give the exact site location. I don't even see a standard distance for the offsets. This really annoys me.