halcyoncmdr

Part of that could easily be explained by usage. A single LTE upgraded tower in a suburban area may be setup to broadcast a signal approx 2 miles out (I am simplifying it quite a bit, but for the sake of argument, we'll go with it). Now, there may be an additional 2-3 towers within range of your location, but they aren't upgraded yet. Every user with an LTE-capable phone will be picking up that signal since it is the only LTE signal available. That tower may be handling 3-4x as much usage as it is intended to (just like Sprint's legacy 3G network currently wasn't designed for the data usage on it currently). As those other nearby towers are upgraded and come online, it gets a bit better as the usage is now spread out over more towers so each one isn't doing as much work on its own. Once all of the towers are upgraded, you'll get the average post-NV speeds Sprint intends. Sprint isn't going to pay more money up front during deployment to either get even faster backhaul to compensate for the initial slowness due to site overload, or to try and allocate additional LTE carriers on a tower (if spectrum is even available for it) that will need to be removed later once surrounding sites are upgraded. It isn't financially or logistically feasible to do this with ~39,000 towers nationwide.

This setting can be changed remotely by Sprint with a provisioning refresh sent to the phone. I believe the EVO LTE always reverts back to CDMA/LTE when you update the data profile (it did at launch at least).

Yes, many areas already have Band Class 10 active if there was enough excess 800MHz spectrum in the area to allow it. Now that iDEN is shut down today we should start seeing a lot more sites go active with 800MHz. Unfortunately my area won't be a full overlay due to the IBEZ. Many towers are being upgraded to BC10 in my area, but not all.

Official change logs are on the second tab of the Google doc. xxx97 - Updated to add Band Class 10 support nationwide for all planned markets. Roaming changes in eastern Colorado and western Kansas.

Stock rooted S3 has the grey background as well.

It's a mix. The standard Sprint markets wouldn't get people excited at all (only 99 to announce). However, going down to a city level, that leaves a lot of room for the marketing folks.

Since it is related, I will remind everyone that the latest PRL version released June 4th added nationwide 800 SMR, not just specific areas like with previous updates. This is obviously in anticipation of the iDEN shutdown in a few days so that essentially with a flip of a few switches signal will improve at almost all upgraded sites, and all future sites can have it enabled at acceptance time. If there is a site within range of your phone as it scans for a signal (i.e. when turned on or toggling airplane mode) it will connect to it, regardless of which area of the country you are in. All current PRLs (xxx97 and xxx15) have 800SMR support built in. The iPhone PRLs are unique in that 1900MHz is prioritized over 800 SMR, and the Note II has SMR missing entirely due to a calling issue. Otherwise, all standard PRLs are nearly identical and have 1900 and 800 frequencies at the same priority level. http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/4085-current-sprint-prls/

I want them to bring back the classic Sprint commercials. Bring back the trenchcoat.

Most likely I'll just remove the oldest leaving the current and one version back.

The dates represent the date each PRL was released. Performing a PRL update will automatically send the most current PRL for your phone and account type. On the iPhone you perform updates by dialing ##UPDATE# and hitting the call button. The info in this thread is exactly that, information.Sprint must pay for all roaming usage so it segregates corporate accounts with better roaming experience in some areas due to roaming agreements with whatever carrier is there. Consumer accounts may be limited to 1x roaming where corporate accounts may have EVDO roaming.

61010 | no change | EVDO | Prepaid-No BC10 It's there.

The Note II has its own set of PRLs. The Corporate one with 3G roaming is 2001The HTC One is a svLTE AWM device, so it would be 540xx for the corporate 3G PRL. The latest PRL series xxx15 and xxx97 have nationwide 800smr for all SIDs that will be used.

This is true. NV was entirely financed a while ago. Everything now is caused by the deployment itself, or weather. Bad weather is terrible. Especially when it takes out a new site just accepted. All new equipment, now lost. R.I.P. equipment.

THIS is entirely the truth. I work in retail as a technician. At least 75% of what I hear from customers about their phone "issues" is psychological and usually based on a misconception they got from somewhere or someone else. Task Killers, etc. usually just cause more harm than good now on Android phones as the system is smart enough to handle it in the background. iOS doesn't have the history of ingraining about task killers before it was built-in since previously it wasn't capable at all of multitasking beyond music or a phone call. If you NEED that psychological idea of killing an app, you can with the recent apps list on Android, and the App drawer on iOS works the same way. If an app is truly having an issue and it does happen to still be running in memory (i.e. recently used), closing it in the App Drawer or in Recent Apps will force close it, potentially correcting the issue when it starts up again. If it isn't actively running because you haven't used it in a while, it will do nothing really. Also, quite often games will cause the most issues. Candy Crush is one of the worst I've ever seen at leaving itself running and causing all sort of issues on both Android and iOS devices.

Already getting to use my new post... haha Here's a thread with all of the current Sprint PRLs, including the Note II-specific ones. http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/4085-current-sprint-prls/

I believe that about 50% of the purpose of the Nextel shutdown is to save costs. Bad leasing deals mean less profit. It's pretty easy to just end a bad lease when the network is shutdown and lose that coverage since the Sprint CDMA customer side never even knew it was there in all likelihood. Continuing to pay a high lease for coverage that may not be very profitable doesn't make much sense since most of the CDMA customers there won't even notice. There's always the possibility as I said that they could add it again in the future at a lower lease amount, it is after all more likely that an empty tower will have lower costs associated with it since no one is using it and it will just cost the tower company that owns it to maintain it. Some money coming in is better than none. The other 50% was getting the 800MHz spectrum back for use with 1x and LTE.

I did misunderstand. That being said, I think a lot of it also has to do with customer perception and the average person's total ignorance with technology. For example, say your cable box is having an issue and you call Comcast tech support. They go through their first tier stuff about plugging it in, etc. and then they say they're sending a "signal" to your box and you need to turn it off. All they are doing is forcing you to do a power cycle of the box, no signal is sent. Most of the time, a simple power cycle fixes the issue, but if they were to actually tell the customer that, the customer would just say they already did it to try and get past the stuff they believe is not related. The same thing happens here. It isn't about the PRL update itself so much, it's about the radio reset that comes with it. Working in retail tech, I can tell you the average smartphone customer in this country now knows very little about how any of the technology works. Most still treat their phone like a simple phone that has touch and a good web browser. Unfortunately to those of us that truly do know what we're talking about, it ends up making it all look pointless and a waste of time. But "tricking" the average customer into doing what we really need done by some other explanation gets things done faster. Multiple that time difference between truly explaining to an already irate customer that all they needed to do was restart their phone (something the average person never does unless it runs out of battery), and just tricking them into doing it, saves millions of dollars each quarter. The CSRs on the phone are rated on a series of metrics, one of them used to be AHT (average handle time), how long they are on the phone with a single customer. With the changes to Customer Service that is no longer true for Sprint's call center vendors, however that's how almost the entire rest of the industry works and thus it's the mentality.It's not about fixing the issue, it's about getting people off the phone. Sprint's Customer Service changes however removed AHT from metrics and instead replaced it with First Call Resolution, did the issue get fixed with the first call. A much more useful metric. Unfortunately I can tell you the average call call enter worker gets paid near minimum wage, to answer a phone all day long, getting yelled at by customers for issues they have no direct control over. On top of that, usually the call center training is insufficient because the turnover rate in call centers is so high that spending the money on adequate training would be a waste because 50-75% of the workers being trained won't be there in a year. The new network tools available to the reps definitely have the power to get things done, but the average Care rep probably doesn't have adequate training to be able to properly utilize them. Add to all this the possibility of the rep simply being entirely apathetic to the entire situation or their job in general (getting yelled at constantly by faceless entitled-feeling people all day will do that to you) and you end up with poor results. I don't know exactly how Sprint's vendors operate since I am in retail, but I do have friends that work in call centers for American Express, Comcast and GEICO. All of them have similar stories and experiences. It may also have something to do with the average American believing all call centers are in other countries now and no one they talk to is actually in the U.S. I'm not defending anything, there is obviously room for improvement. In the real world though, the average person doesn't care how their phone works or how it gets fixed. They just want it to work. If the PRL update does fix it simply because of the radio reset that comes with it and it gets fixed in 2 minutes, the customer will be happier. It works more often than not. I have a sneaking suspicion this is why the ##SCRTN# menu to reset all phone programming and have it reprovision, update PRL and check for firmware updates again no longer requires the phone's MSL. It does often work as a catch-all that fixes a variety of different issues, it's easy to tell someone how to do, and it's relatively easy for a person t o remember for later.

I had a feeling it was something you had planned, but I had access to all of them at once, officially. Much faster than figuring it out on your own with every phone, and much easier than trying to figure out each corporate PRL.

Not poor training. Standard training. The only officially supported configuration for your phone is current official software and current official PRL. If you are not on those, your phone is technically unsupported by Sprint for technical support. Just because you may not like a change in the new version doesn't mean Sprint has to support you. There have been several updates in the last few years that have changed roaming partners (especially roaming partners that were visible as native coverage) and resulted in customers unable to access any service when their phone locks onto that signal after the roaming agreement expires. An updated PRL would remove that entry or update with a different roaming partner. I've seen this happen at least twice since I started working for Sprint (once in my area). Some areas that may still work, in some it won't; it depends entirely on what's actually changed over the years in regards to roaming agreements..

After seeing some of the threads here and around the rest of the forum, I took it upon my self to find all of Sprint's current PRLs. I made a separate thread for easy reference in the future. http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/4085-current-sprint-prls/

Most of the iDEN-only towers have bad leasing agreements, or overlapping coverage with CDMA towers. Some towers were determined to be advantageous to upgrade to NV, others weren't. Towers with horrible leasing agreements are being let go entirely. In some cases that leaves the tower owner with absolutely no leased space. An unused tower will bring in no money so they may end up offering Sprint a discount rate later down the line if they can't find another leasee.

And now we've lost control of it and it frightens us. "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." -Thomas Jefferson

After reading some threads here in regards to PRL versions and the differences between each version on different devices, I took the time to find the listing of all current Sprint PRLs. This includes the official changes made with each new PRL revision as well. > https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eNgQKxdPHgua60suUeQ4E7KvtUAFPDVkpqTL2sBorNg/pubhtml While the information this comes from is on an internal Sprint page, the information itself is not proprietary as it can all be obtained through an analysis of the PRLs loaded on every Sprint device in the wild, something members of this community have already been doing. My hope is that by making this information easier to find, it will lead to more discussion and overall a better community.

As we all know... Chicago has been a unique case compared to just about everywhere else in the country. Legacy and Network Vision boundaries have caused all sorts of issues that were unexpected.

It may be, it may not be (most likely not). Alcatel-Lucent seems to enjoy updating 3G only first then going back through 60-90 days later and getting the LTE hooked up. This may be a planned design due to backhaul delays. They can get all of the equipment installed and if backhaul is available, awesome; if not, they already have a second visit preliminarily scheduled that should be far enough out that backhaul will be in place at that time. I know a site near my house that has been upgraded and obviously has new backhaul installed (100kbps before, 2.5mbps after upgrade) but 4G LTE is not hooked up yet. Other sites may not have the backhaul available and may just get hooked up to the legacy backhaul if it can be, or left alone with no connections until backhaul is available. Network Vision is a living breathing thing. We know the end result. However, there are hundreds of things that all need to be in place to complete even a single site. Any one of these things can delay a part or all of a site's upgrades. This is why a specific map of specific tower upgrade plans is not available I don't think even the vendors really know what order everything is going to happen. They're just working on whatever tower they are able to get access to (rooftop access by landlord, etc.), with the equipment needed for the site (I'm near the IBEZ and we have quite a few GMO sites here as well, each have their own unique characteristics), the backhaul in place by the vendor (CenturyLink in my area mostly), and the contractors in place to get the actual work done. Add to that the Arizona heat where I'm at, storms in other areas of the country, etc. and it all can be even further delayed or otherwise slowed compared to the initial plan..