SWMich4G

Here's what Verizon shows for coverage in their newest commercial for those who haven't seen the January version: It pretty clearly shows Sprint in last place for total footprint, which I do not believe to be the case.

The Verizon coverage comparison commercials have bothered me for a while. It bothers me that they claim their LTE network covers 95% of North Dakota & Nebraska, and 90% of South Dakota. But it's expected they would wildly exaggerate their own network's coverage. It irks me even more that while they are accurate (or even a little generous) on T-Mobile's and AT&T's coverage, they very noticeably understate Sprint's. I was thinking about doing this earlier, but after Kevin Fitchard published the laughably pathetic "the State of LTE in the US" article, claiming Sprint has "the smallest coverage footprint" of the 4, I had to post this. This is using Sensorly data from 1/30/14. On the full-screen zoom level I took every pixel that had coverage (purple), and filled in the appropriate solid color Verizon uses on their commercials. This obviously ignores local density and signal strength, just like the Verizon charts. So maybe I'm biased, but take a look and YOU tell ME who has "the smallest coverage footprint." Actual pixels (big) And in case those are too spread out to tell, here's an animated progression of T-Mobile, then AT&T, then Sprint, then Verizon:

They need a Metro app so I can view on my tablet.

Hey man, you got a new message in your inbox.

I'm hoping they just misworded this: "Once you have reached 80% of your purchased usage you will receive a notification on your mobile device. At that time, you may choose to add on a little extra, or wait until your next billing cycle to start using your mobile device. " So you can either (1) buy more minutes when you've used up 80% of your minutes, or (2) stop using your device? So what about that last 20% you paid for? There's no option to "continue using the remainder of your minutes for the month" in there. And looking at the rates, I don't see it as any better than any other prepaid plan. Any given combination of minutes/data/texts has better options out there, so the only real benefit is that your plan basically re-adjusts via notifications per month - meaning it's less work than some other prepaids for people who have dramatically different usage from month to month. The roaming could also be a plus, but I have serious doubts as to how much and at what speeds that would be.

It was always circles. They may have changed the rate at which it updates though, so now there's more space between the circles (e.g. one point every 5 seconds now vs one point every 3 seconds before or something like that). On old data if you zoom all the way in anywhere there's a single pass mapped, you can see the overlapping circles. I've also noticed the circles don't seem to overlap on much of the mapping I did this month, so the individual data points are more visually obvious and don't merge together into lines. I imagine it was just a temporary issue with either their servers, the app, or my gps, since it's not ALL spread apart, but some of my mapping is definitely dotted lines recently.

Ew just noticed (since I almost never go there anymore) that the new maps don't even have railroad tracks. It's like they were designed to make it as difficult as possible to tell where you're looking. I'm surprised they even label the streets.

I guess I forgot to put a winky face at the end of that post.

Advanced search -> Find words "sponsor" -> check "only search in titles" -> Search Now You'd get 13 results before you made this thread. The 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th result all provide the info and are pretty clear by the title that they do. Most of the other results have a link to the thread with the information. So yeah, we hid it.

I wish they'd throttle connections to speedtest.net so people would stop wasting bandwidth doing 8 tests in an hour.

The lack of color is becoming even more annoying that I thought it'd be. Not only can I not easily see where the coverage starts and stops due to the lack of contrast, I also can't find where I am on the map. With an overlay (the coverage) on a map you NEED an easy way to quickly identify where you're looking. They've removed the ability to quickly scan for things like parks, hospitals, schools, major highways, city limits, etc. Those are all colored on the old maps, and now EVERYTHING is gray, so now you're basically left with reading the street names, which conveniently auto-resize to around 7pt font for most streets. I don't know who's doing the beta testing there, but I want their eyesight if they can quickly read gray-on-gray, 7pt text that has a ~67% opaque purple overlay on top of it. I understand it's a business and cost was probably a factor, but it's hard to make money when you lose the majority of your contributing users by making your product far less user-friendly. And I'm not trying to sound rude, since I used to love the site and app, and would gladly pay $10 for the old versions were they not free. I just can't express how bad some of the changes have been without coming across as harsh. I also appreciated that we actually had a rep coming to our forum before, despite us only representing 1 of hundreds of carriers they cover. I'd love to know the reasoning for the changes, but they way things are going OpenSignal is looking a lot more attractive despite being incredibly inaccurate. At least I can read their maps.

I'm gonna stop you right there. I see you did a lot of work, but that first point is simply not true. The VAST majority of people would never know the difference between 5 mbps and 50 mbps, assuming they have the same ping/latency. While it may be true people respond to numbers in advertising, in real life usage they will personally not even be able to tell the difference. Once you reach a certain bandwidth, all the matters for everyday phone use is ping. While it's nice to have that ability to say "10 times faster than carrier X!" in marketing, it doesn't seem any faster to the consumer. Hand them 2 phones and they'll think the one with lower pings is faster, even if the bandwidth is lower.

I guess I'll be the first to complain. I really dislike the new gray maps on the website. Makes it much harder to see and is much less visually pleasing. I also dislike how there is no fullscreen option anymore. Also I really don't need a giant red marker telling me where Michigan is and blocking the tiles. How do I get rid of it?

Oh well. Guess I'll hold off until the price goes back down.

Is sensorly able to map band 26 and band 41 LTE yet? If not, are they going to be on the same map or a different map?

Is it possible that's a phone issue instead of a sensorly issue? My S4 started like that for the first month but I think a subsequent update fixed it. A lot of the random stray dots in SW Michigan (and Lake Michigan) were from me before the fix.

Ignoring the title of the article, which I imagine most news outlets will use, the results seem appropriate. The survey was for the service over the past year, not the "potential" a network has, so you have to ignore that. It was taken from a sample of metro areas, so that kills the main advantage Sprint has over T-mobile. Sprint's method of site-by-site LTE activation as soon as a site is upgraded kills the 4G reliability rating (you obviously can't hold onto LTE with the shotgun spread of live sites that every market has until ~70%+ completion). It may have been too recent to affect the results, but the CSFB issue only makes that worse. As for voice and text reliability, we should all know how that's been in some markets as they've gone through legacy -> NV equipment, vendor changes, 1900 -> 800 (and in some places 800 -> 1900), and the obvious flat-out down time from upgrading every site. Value is pretty obvious, since you're paying almost the same as the big 2 for already worse coverage in most areas, during a transitional year, and most of the time the phones cost more on top of all that. There's also no value in unlimited data for the people who can't even stream Pandora due to their data speeds. Obviously places like Chicago, Atlanta, South Bend, and a few others probably had Sprint at #1 or 2, but that's because NV was already past its critical mass in those areas for much of the last year. If Sprint gets B41 and B26 along as planned and the NV1 upgrades continue at their current rate, I would certainly not expect Sprint to rank #4 in a year. But based solely on the network's status for the past year in metro areas, 4th is pretty much what they average out to.

Just my opinion, but I think it's better without. As much as I'd love to have a place where I can buy & sell more personally than craigslist and ebay, it just doesn't seem to fit in with this site. I'd prefer the only exchange of money be donations, and the only draw for new members be the content (as opposed to people that would inevitably join just to buy/sell). It's also a lot of work to effectively set up and moderate a B&S forum, especially if you get into a feedback or rating system, etc, etc.

I'm not. I was trying to jokingly respond to your (joking?) attack so it wouldn't escalate (I do have a lot more scripts blocked than even most advanced users). I guess I'll just leave it at that and leave the thread. I'm sure this subject affects you a lot more than me anyway. I just wanted to present the other side of the situation cause even I have been caught for a second thinking the prices were cheaper than they actually are.

You may need a better ad blocker if you're getting that banner. And without that there's no indication on the phones page that it's already included in the price unless you scroll all the way down to the bottom and read the one tiny line of text. I'm not saying it's not what 95% of businesses would do, I'm just saying it's their fault when people come in expecting that pricing. Not everyone reads the fine print, and even if you don't, a lot of people instinctively close pop-ups without reading them. I understand it's frustrating dealing with those customers, but we both know there would be fewer of them coming into the store if they listed the upgrade price, put a more obvious indicator right under each price that it's including a special discount, or if they simply put a price range that covered both groups of customers.

You have to admit automatically deducting $100 from the price for anyone viewing the webpage is misleading. I'm totally fine with giant banners all around saying "ADDITIONAL $100 OFF FOR NEW CUSTOMERS!" As it is, you go to the phones page and they display a price that ONLY new customers can get with NO indication that that is the case. You have to click through to the device details to see that you're actually paying $100 more. People planning on buying in store aren't likely to get that far. And with ad-blocking, you don't ever get a pop-up indicating the limitations of the pricing, either. Blame whoever designed the webpage for those angry customers. They intentionally chose a design that misleads.

Well it has knocked Sprint voice down around here. I'm getting normal LTE strength but am roaming on US Cellular 1x. Some areas are without power, but there are at least 10 Sprint sites I'm within 1x800 range of so I'm guessing the whole network around here is having issues.

I'm noticing sometimes my S4 takes a LONG time to turn on the screen after I unplug if from the charger. Like over 30 seconds long. And the green light stays on (as if it's still connected to the charger) until the screen turns on. This only happens if I turn it on after unplugging it.

I prefer reinstalling. I used to do it every couple months (so I didn't have to buy a Windows license!) but have been busy with 2 jobs & don't have any days off to do it anymore. Reinstalling from a clean install eliminates any viruses/malware/bloat that you've developed on your drive. I have a printout of everything to backup before the wipe and the order everything has to be reinstalled, as well as a usb stick with all the needed applications and drivers so it only takes a few hours to do everything. This is immensely easier when you have a separate system drive and store all permanent files on other physical disks. For most people, cloning the drive is easier, but I don't like the drawbacks. I do very occasionally save an image of my boot drive for backup-backup reasons (in case I totally forget a new app has profiles or settings to backup or something like that), but have never used one. EDIT: Also wow I forgot SSDs went back up in price. The drive I bought 18 months ago is going for 150% of what I paid, and that's for the refurbished version! Still ~$90 for a SSD is not bad, and 128GB is plenty if you only store OS, applications, and a couple games on the drive.

Also, if it's your system drive don't forget to backup your application data before the drive dies. It's easy to forget, but backing up your email, bookmarks, and any other program-specific profiles/settings is always a good idea. As long as we're on the subject, can anyone recommend software to repair a drive with corrupt headers? It has to have the ability to repair an actual mounted drive/partition as opposed to the physical disk itself, since the drive is encrypted. I can successfully mount it (decrypt) since I restored the encryption headers, but the beginning of the data is trashed, including the folder structure. The software Get Data Back NTFS did a good job at reading most everything, but I didn't know if there were other (cheaper) options. Windows likes to occasionally initialize encrypted volumes without asking permission.