iansltx

They may have access to more, but no point in lighting more than 40 MHz of NR when you're backhaul constrained. NR carrier was at 2575.35 for both sites. For the 2xCA site you have 2545.6 and 2525.8 for B41, so they're packing stuff pretty tightly. For the colo'd site you had 2525.8 for TMo, 2640.4 and 2660.2 for Sprint. The Sprint EARFCNs match what I see where I'm sitting now in Austin proper. So we're looking at 120 MHz deployed between the 2CA site and the nearest Sprint B41 site, with the 80 MHz on TMo's side contiguous and the 40 MHz from Sprint contiguous, but a huge gulf between them. I've occasionally seen a Magic Box in SCP so maybe they need to reclaim 40 MHz from there to bump up n41 bandwidth, or they may not have the spectrum to play with. If they indeed have a dedicated uplink channel for MBs/small cells and another slice for MB broadcast, that gets us up to ~160 MHz. Which I wouldn't be surprised if that's all they have here. I will say that if they were worried about running out of spectrum, I wouldn't have seen the 2CA at the second site. T-Mobile could run an 80 MHz NR channel now if they ignored B41, but my bet is they will move their B41 around once MBs are gone and expand to 80 MHz anyway. One caveat here is I know in 78624 MBs don't work due to spectrum availability, though I don't think that's an issue I'm WilCo.

Went on an expedition this evening to check out the two sites in the Austin area that have n41. In both cases they were running B41 as well. The first one was colo'd with Sprint, so they were running 100 MHz of 2.5 off of the site (60 TMo, 40 Sprint). The second wasn't; I was able to get a -123 signal from the nearest Sprint B41. I maxed out around 100 Mbps down on both, with B41 downloads basically as fast as n41 (uploads were faster). Hopefully they get the backhaul in gear. Site range was a mile or so. Had CellMapper turned on for part of the trip so y'all can check my work

X60 and DImensity 1000C phones, to be precise. Remember that TMo's Velvet variant is what they used to demo NR CA. WOuldn't be surprised if priority ends up being right behind mmWave, as that would pull data use away from LTE, allowing T-Mobile to more quickly deploy n2 or n66 without even bothering with DSS.

Or TMo doesn't want you to use it unless absolutely necessary because doing so loses you the extra bandwidth provided by PCS and AWS.

The new iPhones look to be quite solid devices. No word on which modem they're using, or more importantly capabilities like VoNR and NR-NR carrier aggregation, but the entire lineup has mmWave support, which was a bit of a surprise (though since they start at $700 they can afford to include it). One thing I noticed is that the SIM-free and Sprint/TMo versions are $30 more than the VZW/AT&T versions. I'm guessing that this is because the latter two carriers' models don't include CDMA, and making a special version just for Sprint/TMo was a bit more expensive. Interestingly, VZW and AT&T are running promos on the iPhone, and T-Mobile...isn't. Not on Apple's site at least. Either way, even the Mini is a solid phone. There's some Apple Tax to it but the fact that a phone that small has the fastest CPU of any phone out there is pretty great.

It's a little surprising just how little 5G VZW has on their "nationwide" rollout. On one hand, they didn't have the excuse of FirstNet to touch a ton of cell sites. On the other, this looks like a fraction of the area covered by B5 licenses. There's plenty of room for improvement, but they went from not having 5G in a bunch of large metros to...still not having 5G in a bunch of large metros. 99% sure T-Mobile's n71 was bigger at launch than VZW's is now, and I wouldn't be surprised if AT&T's was as well, despite not launching with DSS. I saw something on Reddit about VZW not wanting to run n2 because they'd have to use a low-band anchor for that, which would mean the (old, congested) B13 LTE that they started with a decade ago. At this rate, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they waited until they had SA ready to launch n2, and at that point we'll probably see n66 as well.

Bit of a cross-post but in Austin they're (back) up to 15x15 n71 as of today. They've moved the 5x5 B71 LTE carrier up to their newly rented block from Dish to make this happen, and interestingly B71-only performance seems to be a good bit better than usual, sitting at 15/5 rather than single digits. If I had to guess, previously they were including B71 in CA combos (I've seen 2+4+12+71 before I think), and widening NR let them be way less aggressive with what actually gets CA'd, dropping down to a single 10x10 2 or 66 channel rather than the previous grab bag. This relegates B71 back to its rightful spot as the band of last resort when you can't get coverage another way, with positive implications for speed when that really is all you have.

On the network side of things, NR is up to 15x15 here as of today. Not seeing bits-and-pieces CA like I was previously, so speeds are actually down slightly, but I know capacity overall is up, and connectivity seems to be a bit more reliable than usual. I'm being routed over Sprint's backbone at the moment again rather than getting a direct T-Mobile IP, so maybe that has something to do with it.

The service is deprioritized vs. phones, so it's just a matter of consistently having capacity available. Caps don't actually do much for peak congestion anyway, hence the move to deprioritization above soft caps.

Yeah, this feels overwrought. T-Mobile-branded phones have been made by Coolpad and TCL. Wouldn't be surprised if this is about 5G home modem/routers. Historically, T-Mobile has used Huawei and ZTE for their USB modems (I had a Huawei H+21 USB stick, then later a ZTE DC-H+ one). Wouldn't be surprised if one of those manufacturers, or someone like Coolpad (makers of the Coolpad Surf) or TCL are offering decent pricing on 5G home modems, and no one else is. Not sure who makes the LTE home modem, but wouldn't be surprised if it's one of the Chinese manufacturers already. IMO it's less of a big deal to have Huawei/ZTE gear at the edge than at the core; if the gear at the edge does something untoward, T-Mobile can block that traffic before it gets to the internet. Not like they're going to deploy anything other than Ericsson or Nokia (or maybe Samsung) in their core.

Why would it be "the next CLWR disaster"? They're rolling this out the same way VZW did their broad expansion...last week, I guess it was? Basically any sector that has significant available capacity all the time represents an eligible area...so you're basically talking about areas where T-Mobile has touched sites recently to light all of B2 and B66, yet those sites are on the edge of an area that needs density so one or two of the sectors are pointing toward where there are fewer people. This is where T-Mobile is getting the "20 million households" number from...that's maybe 15% of the US household count. I checked three addresses in various areas, including two where the service is explicitly available in the region, and service was available at none of them. Which is fine...my home address is in an area where T-Mobile doesn't have the capacity on 2/66 to handle this. The second address would probably be out of range for B66 indoors and the B2 network is sorely lacking in that area. The third address wasn't on their city list, and is in a dense enough area that offering service there would be a bad idea. I tried a fourth address...small town, with a 5G site nearby...and that one actually successfully qualified. The person at that address doesn't need the service right now...they have 100M down, 30M up from Windstream for about the same price...but they're super lucky to be able to get those speeds, and if they were paying more for less I'd have them switch over to this. There's no danger of the network saturating in that area, and while only B2, B12, and B71 are available at that location, that should be enough to provide decent speeds. Now, I fully expect that T-Mobile will start rolling out 5G modems for this service once they're priced reasonably. That will open up a few additional areas capacity-wise on n71 (remember, T-Mobile gets to use any 600 that the FCC wasn't able to sell at the last auction, and has entered into lease agreements with additional 600 spectrum recently), though the real boost will be for areas that come online with n41. n41 has enough capacity, particularly as channel widths expand, that T-Mobile can offer this service in denser areas. I expect their home modems to use MediaTek chips that support NR CA, so n41 can be used almost exclusively for downlink, with uplink over n71 being strong enough to support efficient modulations, increasing capacity there. Or LTE uplink can be used...plenty of options there. Note that the hardware they're handing out does *not* support B41 LTE; only legacy TMo bands are supported. So they aren't trying to run a Clearwire style operation at the moment where they just throw 2.5 at a problem and see if that solves it.

I got the Android 11/OneUI 3 beta update yesterday. My phone is reasonably reliable again, mobile hotspot config works properly again, WiFi works consistently, no more constant crashes...there are a few rough edges still I think, but my opinion has gone from "don't install this" to "probably fine to install this"

T-Mobile just demo'd NR-NR CA on the LG Velvet...there's a benefit to their variant using the Dimensity 1000 vs. a Snapdragon, which doesn't support NR-NR CA. Nice thing about this advancement is now the limiting factor for 2.5 coverage will basically be how far the 2.5 downlink signal can go, vs. how far a mid-band uplink can go...and there's definitely a difference there because a base station is more powerful than a phone. In the press release T-Mobile focused on higher download speeds (increased by 20% over n41 alone) and better coverage, but maybe we'll get an upload capacity improvement here as well, particularly in markets that don't have 20 MHz LTE channels to bond to. Guessing top-line upload speeds won't change much though, unless TMo can get n71 online at 20 MHz in some market.

Based on the "toggle 5G off and look for the different color" trick on the T-Mobile map, appears that there are two n41 sites in the Austin area. One around Cedar Park, one near Round Rock. The one in RR (monopole site) is near Sam Bass Road and Hermitage Dr in Round Rock (near the parking lot of the shopping center First Star Bank is in). The other (full-on big ol' tower near CP) is near where Lone Star Dr turns north to meet W Whitestone Blvd (aka 1431). Maybe I'll decide next week that it's a good day to take a 20-mile bike ride and check 'em out, if someone doesn't beat me to doing the field testing. Doesn't look like either of 'e cover a super dense area, so I imagine speeds should be solid.

Looks like VZW's NOC told someone "yeah, our cell sites are basically idling in these markets", and VZW decided to actually do something with that capacity. https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-expands-lte-home-internet-more-rural-areas I imagine these same markets are where Visible would work well (high latency aside).

They don't need 600/700 on every site. That just raises the noise floor in areas where sites are less than a mile apart. They should definitely have 600 on every site that has 700 though. Also, the 1k sites/month figure they're throwing around is just 2.5 upgrades. Site upgrades where they're just doing band 71, PCS/AWS M-MIMO, etc., are on top of that. So year-end 2023 for a completed 2.5 rollout seems reasonable, given that there will be sites where 2.5 doesn't cover enough people to matter. Re: fixed wireless, I doubt that the wide rollout for fixed wireless will use anything other than 2.5 and maybe mmWave. Even when they start running n2/n66.

Finally got VoLTE back after a bunch of fighting with SCRTN. VoLTE has been gone for the better part of a week, despite being in an area with gapless LTE coverage, and call quality has been pretty bad...and losing simultaneous voice and data hurt.

For the last day or two, despite being "forced on", I've lost VoLTE, and 5G is a lot rarer. Just ran SCRTN; hopefully I get VoLTE back, as 1x voice quality is disappointing.

Use Samsung Band Selection for that.

In some areas T-Mobile has access to more band 71 spectrum than Sprint had B25...and B71 goes further than B26...and it's the band where T-Mobile's nationwide 5G is deployed (usually all but 5 MHz of band 71 is used for 5G). Without B71, low-band with TMo is *at best* 5 MHz of B12 LTE, and some areas don't even have that because other carriers own all the B12 licenses.

Good point re: Dish being interested. They could ask for divestiture of Family Mobile and SIMple Mobile brands, since both use T-Mobile exclusively, and swapping them over would minimize the impact to those subscribers, while providing Dish an even larger customer base. I'm sure T-Mobile gives Dish a better deal than they do Tracfone, as not only does Dish have a larger subscriber base (Boost is larger than Tracfone's entire non-VZW customer base), but they negotiated their MVNO agreement when T-Mobile had to get the deal done to merge. Dish could push for divesting T-Mobile based customers from the other multi-carrier brands (Tracfone proper, Straight Talk, Net10, SafeLink), but splitting out the brands might be more trouble than it's worth at that point. Moving an entire brand over would be simpler, even if those brands are sitting on a unified backend on Tracfone's side. Dish will have a billing system of their own to migrate folks to anyway.

Well, we're into the new billing cycle and Ting let us keep the 20GB per line plan somehow. Pure Talk SIMs are coming, but they'll sit around unactivated until this plan stops...which might be the end of the month, or might be the end of *this* billing cycle...or ??? We'll definitely hop over to AT&T (via Pure Talk) between now and a couple months from now, but plan is to hop back when new plans on Ting come out, assuming either we can get those plans on Sprint's network or T-Mobile cleans up their act in 78624 (putting B66 on the sites that are currently PCS-only would probably do the trick without needing to take spectrum away from anything else...and they could add 600 for good measure...both are on exactly one site there).

That phone doesn't have band 71. Picking it up for Sprint/TMo would be a bad idea.

They have iPhones on their network right now that can't access n71/n41. If anything, they're *more* ready for a 5G iPhone than a 4G one, as they'll have more capacity to work with it. With the Dish et al leases coming online in the coming weeks, low-band-only will be in a decent spot, and of course you have the rather quick mid-band pace going on. I'd expect another milestone announcement around the time the iPhone is released saying that more cities are covered with mid-band. They can decide how much to push for new customers by offering promos, vs. converting their existing customer base over. Seems like network-wise this wouldn't be any more of an event than Verizon migrating everyone on Tracfone's brands to their network (which would equate to a ~6% increase in customer base).

T-Mobile is leasing another bunch of spectrum from another speculator: Interesting that they were able to come to terms for San Antonio but not Austin, as the firm owns the same block in both PEAs. My bet with both this and the Dish leases is that T-Mobile won't try to renew them when they expire, or at least won't outbid Dish for them. 2.5 years from now they should have n41 online in enough places that n71 will get a fraction of the use it does now, in absolute terms, with n2/25 coming online around then as well (if I had to guess, both PCS CDMA and GSM/H+ will be refarmed directly from those techs to NR without stopping at LTE first unless there's contiguity to be had). The other side of this coin is that I'm betting Dish will try to run on 600-only as long as possible in as many markets as possible, because doing so means fewer tower leases, vs. T-Mobile who can't get away from having mid-band in all but the most rural areas. So a year after Dish builds out in an area 600 will be more valuable to them than to T-Mobile.