MrZorbatron

Irrelevant. Dish's proposed price is nothing but rhetoric. It is essentially a case of rattling the sabre to say that they are willing to spend a lot, so others should beware of being outbid. If no one else goes to the auction, it doesn't matter what they are willing to pay, as long as FCC's minimum prices are met.

FCC doesn't just sell spectrum to whoever wants it. If Sprint has more than the arbitrary "reasonably educated person" would determine they need, FCC won't sell it to them. This is why they shouldn't just grab everything they can when they can, just as a nonstrategic person plays Monopoly.

Can't drive the price up without another bidder. I hope Sprint stays in long enough to stick it to Dish/Echostar/Ergen by jacking the price way up but letting Charlie win the auction.

Priorities can be changed easily. It would guess the switch point would be somewhere around -105-106 RSRP.

I am fairly sure that such a spectrum use contract would also include first option or right of first refusal on ntelos itself as a company, were it ever to shop itself out or be solicited for an acquisition.

The necessity, or lack thereof, of device replacement will be a big deciding factor in subscriber retention. Buy a CDMA carrier and you can immediately shitcan their network in areas of significant overlap. Buy a GSM carrier, you need to phase out the phones before you do anything about their network, and before you do that, you need to blanket their coverage areas with CDMA coverage.

Yeah as long as they buy only CDMA carriers!

Or what will happen is that a "big three" group of carriers will get complacent and start offering a service of diminishing quality, with terms of a similarly diminishing quality, at increased prices. This is what brought the Asian cars into this country. The big three (GM, Ford, Chrysler) got complacent and essentially started making junk. Mechanically the quality of major parts was ok for the most part, but the products were (with very few exceptions) unrefined, overweight, underengineered, and inefficient. Say what you will about the Asian products now, with the gap in reliability having disappeared and in some cases reversed. In the 1970s when they first started appearing here, they were extremely simple little cars with very few options and very little to go wrong (they didn't even offer automatic transmissions until the mid to late 80s). This caused the Americans a lot of headaches because the people who couldn't afford a higher end European car like Mercedes or BMW, but didn't want a car as foreign and different feeling as a 70s or 80s Volkswagen, started buying them. This is exactly what will happen if there is too much consolidation in the cellular services. It will allow an upstart to come in and stir up the market, leaving the major companies scrambling and lowering their quality of services even lower to appear to compete on price. Cimarron Wireless, anybody?

This is not an official forum. This is a users community focusing on the technical aspects of the network, not the administrative ones. I would suggest that you look on sprintusers.com which, although unofficial, is watched closely by Sprint. You could also check out Sprint's official "Buzz About Wireless" forum.

That's only one. Behind it that is a sign. Edit: I reread your post... Can you put up a picture of the site with multiple flagpoles?

I'm surprised a communications guy like you didn't know that. Ever heard of WiFi Analyzer? It's a great app and I use it all the time on my building or campus wifi installs. It works on both bands, though not at once.

I liked my Sanyo 5500. It, and the 5300 I had before it, had great reception. I think good reception was always a Sanyo thing. It wasn't so hot on the 8500, but the M1 was back to being very good.

East MI was iPCS too in some areas. Some of the east edge was built out by Sprint as part of a collocation project with Nextel.

They did offer them as some of the first Sprint phones. They didn't operate on PCS though, they weren't digital, and they weren't a nationwide service. With the Sprint PCS service, however, it was always small handsets.

We have the party of stupid and the party of stupid. Which is stupider seems to depend on the day of the week, the direction the solar wind blows predominantly on that day, whichever direction more coins land coming out of the machines at the mint on that day, and whatever other nonsense. As much as I have my own political views, events over the last few years really have me scratching my head as to if either major party even remembers what its true principles are, or which is more important between whatever is on its particular agenda and what is truly good for this country.

My GS3 fades badly if you push it below -112 or so. I can text ok at -118. but the lowest voice call I've had work well was -116 way up north just a couple of weeks ago, and I had to very carefully adjust how I held the phone and the place where I was standing. Side note... Whoever laid out the cells in northern MI along US-23 is a moron.

Lots of shopping centers with cellular stores tend to also have cell towers in their parking lots.

I hate American politicians.

Also, "human attenuation" such as is caused by hand position and the way you hold your head, becomes so much more of an issue in cases of very weak signal. After all, a 3dB attenuation on a -106dBm signal is a lot bigger a problem than it is with a -98dBm signal.

In a low interference (rural) setting, CDMA of either type tends to remain usable, though not exactly stable, down to about -112 dBm signal levels.

Me

I would rather have some dropped calls than no service at all. I have a different experience with one bar service on CDMA. I have had many, in fact the vast majority of, such calls go perfectly well even for an hour or more. FYI, check the algorithm that Verizon phones use to calculate bars and it will really surprise you.

Bull. Familiarize yourself with IBEZ. Trust me, that will not be resolved before a nominal timeline would expect to see a widespread VoLTE transition. Unless Sprint wants to regain its hard-shed reputation for operaring an often substandard network, they will not make that mistake.

3GPP's allowable power levels don't harm equipment petformance because current radios can't hit 3GPP's max numbers anyway, and you would need a very much narrower focus on a directional antenna (and therefore more radios/antennas and likely therefore narrower cells) to hit the FCC's ERP limits. Same goes for FCC limitations. ATT and VZW don't complain because they have LTE in the 700 MHz band, which maintains a usable signal at a greater distance at a given power level. Couple that with the fact that both 700 and cellular 850 have band power limits that are higher than PCS, and you get the answer to why they do not care.

The MMBS and backhaul architecture can host whatever technologies. GSM is dead though, no one deploys it anymore. It would work fine to host UMTS, which is the migration path from GSM.