iansltx

Interesting. I'll swing by the lone 600 site near me and see if I can catch AWS-3 there.

The nearest 5G tower to me seems to be bandwidth constrained. Couldn't hit more than 25 Mbps on it with an NR signal in the mid -60s. No way is that site that congested at midnight-ish. On the LTE side, just went through various band combos and realized that T-Mobile doesn't own any AWS-3 here I guess. Wish there was an easy way to check but the FCC Spectrum Dashboard doesn't include AWS-3. What TMo calls B66 here via MFBI is actually two 10x10 carriers in AWS-1...and if you aggregate with NR you only get one of 'em. Or B2 if you're unlocky...at least around here B2 is quite the congested 10x10 slice.

Add Austin to the list of areas where B41 hasn't had serious coverage issues for awhile. Yes, you can find places where you'll drop to B25, but if T-Mobile put n41 only on sites that have B41 now, the fact that their n71 network isn't nearly dense enough won't matter anymore because no one would be on it. Speaking of which, walked over to near the closest n71 site to me last night, around a mile away as the crow flies. With a signal in the -60s and an SNR around 15 I wasn't pulling more than about 30M down. Band-selecting away from 5G got me 50+ Mbps. Something about that site is pretty broken. Also noticed while I was there that TMo appears to be the only tenant. The bottom rack is vacant, vs. the other sites nearby that have both them and AT&T.

It's still limited because B71 isn't being used as the anchor AFAIK. I definitely want the lower latency, but the higher upload speeds are a direct quote from Neville so either he's wrong or there's something else there.

Broadcast linear TV is dead though, whether OTA or over cable. People largely want to watch what they watch when they want. Hence "cloud DVR" systems, among other things. Running broadcast has limited utility, and you can use the spectrum for better purposes. You can also assume at this point that folks will have an internet connection capable of video streaming. Certainly TMo can once they roll out n41 and the like. Home broadband is an excuse for T-Mobile to roll out n41 in areas where they normally wouldn't do so. T-Vision is another revenue source/bandwidth sink that can make a case for a denser n41 build, or even mmWave (ugly VZW small cells notwithstanding).

So they have 9-10 weeks to launch NR-SA. Looking forward to the upload speed boost and latency drop, if their hype is borne out. Though I bet that download speeds would take a hit since NR would no longer aggregate with LTE. Of course, who cares about aggregating with LTE if you're playing with 60 MHz of n41...leave the LTE for folks whose phones don't have 5G. In other news, the T-Mobile test drive is back...30 days or 30GB, whichever comes first. The hotspot they're handing out doesn't have CA, but does have B71. Have a few family members that'll find that test drive useful I think.

A company can do more than one thing at once. T-Mobile acquired Layer3 TV awhile back and rebranded it to T-Vision. The existing set top boxes are high-end, full-blown IPTV boxes, rather than the smaller Apple TV style devices you're starting to see from e.g. AT&T. Sounds like they want to drop the expense of those boxes before going for a wider release. Right now, this system is a side project that appears to be working well for its existing subscriber base, though said subscriber base is geographically limited. As T-Mobile gets their fixed wireless on 5G set up, TV comes more into play to compete with other companies bundling TV and wireline internet. So it doesn't particularly make sense for them to hold off on one while they're doing the other. It's not like they're buying the TV boxes from Ericsson and Nokia, dropping the amount of capacity available for building cell sites.

I wonder if that means the plan I'm on gets made more widely available. I have a two year contract now, but basically got Unlimited Premium minus Hulu or whatever for $55/mo. With a massive phone subsidy.

It's been a good six years since we've had one of these. Saw a few threads going on at Reddit and figured we could do the same. For feature phones, there are definite gaps in this list, as I swapped phones a *lot* (hey, prepaid non-smartphones were cheap)...and this is just for the phones that I used for my main line. The smartphone list is more comprehensive, though I've picked up some other phones in some cases as secondaries that I've since forgotten. Feature Phones, in somewhat correct order; Sprint-based prepaid or Boost Mobile unless otherwise noted Nokia 5165 (Beyond Wireless GSM, roaming on Five Star Wireless, AT&TWS home network) Nokia 3560 (see above) Nokia 3595 (T-Mobile, not sure whether it was my main line ever) Nokia 6010 (T-Mobile, see above) LG VI-5225 LG PM-225 Motorola i415 Motorola i285 Motorola i450 Motorola w370 (Tracfone on AT&T...I think this was my phone rather than a brother's) Moto c261 (Tracfone on...AT&T I'm 99% sure) LG 3280 (Tracfone on VZW) Keyocera Cyclops Kyocera K132 (Pocket Communications...briefly before I returned it for a better phone as I recall) Motorola v323i (Pocket Communications, a regional unlimited provider similar to CricKet/MetroPCS that survived only a few years before being folded into CricKet) LG 840g (Tracfone on AT&T) Smartphones; primarily Sprint postpaid unless otherwise noted HTC Mogul iPhone (first-gen, unlocked, running on T-Mobile prepaid) HTC Touch Pro (booted into Android a few times with it) HTC Evo 4G (returned after a few weeks for being too big despite having no keyboard) Samsung Epic 4G Samsung Galaxy S III Google Nexus 4 (T-Mobile; reflashed baseband to get LTE since I didn't care about losing voice; secondary phone) Google Nexus 5 Moto X first-gen (Republic) Sharp Aquos Crystal (Boost...picked up the phone on a lark at Best Buy and then basically didn't use it) Moto X 2nd-gen (Republic) Google Nexus 5X LG Optimus Regard (CricKet...don't ask me why I decided to buy this) Nokia Lumia 520 (AT&T) Google Pixel (first-gen) Essential PH-1 Galaxy S20 As time has gone on, I've slowly bought fewer phones. It was crazy for a bit there, partially because I ran https://g4pp.blogspot.com. Okay, that was the excuse for me getting a ton of phones, not the other way around. In addition to the above, other family members had (I know I'm forgetting a few Motorola StarTAC (Five Star Wireless) Nokia 1221 (Tracfone on Five Star Wireless) Nokia 2126i (Tracfone on Verizon) Samsung m370 LG Optimus V Samsung Galaxy Victory HTC M8 HTC One A9 Moto E4 Plus Moto X4 One of the craziest phone deals of the lot was my mom's Nokia 5165 with CellularOne in central TX. They never bothered to upgrade most of their network to digital, except for roaming from Cingular (a few acquisitions later, they became part of AT&T), but they had some pretty solid deals. They had a $20/mo plan with 90 minutes...except for awhile they were cutting prices in half and adding 1000 minutes for free. So in the mid-2000s you had 1090 minutes for $12.46 including tax or so. I want to say long distance outside their coverage area was extra though.

I didn't check codecs this time. I'll see if I can check this evening on a Sprint-to-Sprint call (VoLTE all the way across, S20 to S20). HD vs. HD+ shows different logos on my phone. Apparently no one I call on AT&T uses a new enough phone to have the newer codecs. EDIT: Inbound from VZW uses 12.2 kbps AMR-NB. Outbound to VZW uses 12.65 kbps AMR-WB and shows up as HD. This was using VoLTE on my side. EDIT 2: Sprint-Sprint was EVS at 13.2 kbps. I should be less surprised of the quality increase for a negligible bandwidth increase, but here we are.

Just called a friend on VZW. Decided to call him rather than the reverse based on y'all saying the probability of HD voice was higher. HD voice worked. There's a definite difference between HD and HD+ of course, but I'll take the quality increase over a standard mobile call any day of the week.

$5 says it isn't DSS. They have enough spectrum in bands 71 and 41 to not need it, and if they're going to climb towers it'll be for adding n71 and n41, neither of which are densely deployed right now. My bet is something about improved low and mid band 5G deployments, with a kicker of opt-in T-Mobile primary network conversion for anyone on Sprint who wants it...and opt-in account conversion (including SIMs) for a subset of plans. Maybe new plans on T-Mobile's side that are at least as good a deal as Sprint's published unlimited plans.

It's not a CDMA vs. GSM thing. Verizon has had transferrable SIMs for awhile. It's a Sprint provisioning thing. T-Mobile will probably just get rid of Sprint provisioning altogether by doling out TMo SIMs rather than fixing the Sprint side.

So here's my crazy prediction: I believe they'll wait that long to ensure that basically all of AT&T's customers will have phones capable of doing LTE in CLR, and WCW's customers will all be VoLTE capable. In addition to the obvious "acquire one company at a time" thing, even though WCW is tiny in comparison with Sprint.

I know the guy who'll be doing drive testing for their Fastest Networks report in Austin, hence asking. What's funny is, when they do those tests, TMo will be at its nadir, while Sprint will be very much alive still in tons of places.

Just did some quick adding and 70% of the US population is in the largest 114 US MSAs. If Dish covered every MSA above 475k population (so, everything from Lafayette, LA on up), and service stopped completely outside MSA borders, they'd hit their 70%. That's while covering none of places as large as Reno, NV. Oh, and if you cover the San Juan, PR MSA, you can just hit the top 110 other MSAs, down to Pensacola, FL (so, everything with >= 500k population). Now, I fully expect Dish to omit some MSAs in the top 114 in favor of others that are closer to their footprint, or have more Boost Mobile user concentration, but this isn't a ridiculously huge lift...and is why Dish is saying they'll be building out only 15k cell sites by 2023...and they'll have help from T-Mobile as TMo casts off a bunch of redundant sites, many of which would love to immediately get a new tenant.

Thing is, building a coverage focused network to cover 70% of the US population using 600 isn't *that* expensive. It's the capacity play that's expensive. You need capacity if you have a ton of customers, which 10MM isn't. Alltel had 12 million customers when Verizon bought them, and covered a larger area than Dish will need to. If you spend $5 billion building a network for, say, 15 million customers, and don't have to subsidize those customers, that's not a huge outlay in the scheme of things.

At least here, TMo has enough for 15x15 NR and 10x10 LTE, but WCW's 600 licenses start almost immediately west/northwest of here (they have 10x10 IIRC). WCW has 10x10 of 700 plus CLR-B here, but no AWS or PCS, so T-Mobile not having any spectrum to play with here on mid-band and 600 isn't WCW's fault. The fault lies squarely with AT&T for that...thanks to acquisitions of CricKet (who acquired Pocket Communications earlier) and Cellular One/Dobson (who bought CellOne/Dobson earlier), they have 5x5 of B12, 2x10x10 of AWS, CLR-A, and 10x10 + 2x5x5 of PCS. Verizon has 15x15 of PCS and 10x10 of AWS (plus their nationwide 700 upper-C). T-Mobile has 10x10 of PCS and 10x10 + 5x5 of AWS alone, plus 15x15 of PCS A-F, but there's no contiguity with TMo unless they did some sort of swap with AT&T, which I doubt would happen. In San Angelo on the other hand, yep, WCW has a whopping 20x20 of AWS, leaving AT&T with 10x10 and T-Mobile with 10x10 of B66...and a mere 5x5 of PCS, with a graveyard of a couple providers (Flat Wireless/ClearTalk, Leaco/NMobile) sitting in PCS and AWS in addition to WCW taking 7.5 MHz of PCS...and Verizon taking 20x20. Sprint has its usual 15x15 + 5x5 though, so eventually T-Mobile won't be quite as bad. Oh, and VZW and WCW split CLR.

Writing this from a few miles west of Fredericksburg, where my phone defaults to 5 MHz of B2 unless I flat-out block that band. No idea why, as B2 performance is can't-run-a-speedtest poor here. B66 is fine, with something like 15x15 spread over a few channels, though upload speeds are poor. NR is hit-or-miss (mostly miss); I'm not seeing more than ~-110 RSRP on B71 so that cell site is apparently nowhere near here. Thing is, since that spectrum is so quiet, I can still pull 20-35 Mbps down on that band (10x10), though of course upload speeds are poor. On the way here, I hit my highest-ever NR download speed: 201 Mbps, just north of where 290 WB merges into 281 for a bit. Uploads are low (~4 Mbps) and jitter was high, and I believe that was on 15 MHz of n71 plus >= 25 MHz of CA'd LTE (2+12+66 I think) but still impressive. I hit 179/22.7 right before. Basically as soon as we hit the Belterra shopping area west of Austin, the network went from being capacity constrained to...not. NR wasn't available for most of the trip, but LTE turned in some solid speeds (70/10) on T-Mobile. There was a point along the way where there was a near-complete dead zone...no Sprint, T-Mobile, or even AT&T roaming. I *might* have had 1x the entire time, but I think that even that dropped for about a half-mile. Sprint B26, then B25, were the first to come back, with T-Mobile B2 a mile or two later. If T-Mo put 600 wherever that Sprint site is on the west side of that dead zone, pretty sure there would be no more dead zone. As an aside, B12 lower-A/B are owned by West Central Wireless near Fredericksburg, so T-Mobile doesn't have B12 here, only B71 and mid-and. In contrast to T-Mobile's performance, Sprint had usable B41 most of the way, though there were points where my phone dipped to B25/26 if I didn't force 41. Actually got the fastest B41 download speeds I've seen on my phone around Deep Eddy, at 196/4 and 179/5. I think this was even on a MiniMacro rather than a full cell site. Finally, yesterday east of Pflugerville (east of Lake Pflugerville) I hit 86.7/46.6 on 10 MHz of n71. Yes, some of that was CA, and yes, that's in a sweet spot where you're at the edge of urban cell spacing but are on a sector pointed out into the countryside, but I'll take it. By contrast, Sprint's MiniMacro had poor service there. EDIT: Pretty sure I found the NR site SE of Fredericksburg. After setting my phone to 4+66+71+n71 I was seeing speeds topping out at 100 Mbps down, 15 Mbps up. Should've tried with NR disabled but didn't think to.

They won't have to deploy midband RRUs to meet deployment requirements since 600/700/800 travels further, and the tech is the same for both. Midband will be solely a capacity play, since that'll get them 40 MHz of downlink and 15 MHz of uplink in most areas (see https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/wake-doj-deal-where-dish-s-spectrum-and-how-much-does-it-have). That's on top of low-band, which after n26 comes online will be 20x15 (albeit split over three different bands) at least, and a symmetric amount more in some markets. With a comparatively minuscule customer count, the network should fly with that amount of spectrum. My guess is that in three years Dish won't have touched 30% of the US population, so T-Mobile will be able to renew 600 licenses in those areas uncontested, including in plenty of rural areas, for another three years. For the remaining 70% of the US population (which will be a pretty small % of territory, so a rather small number of licenses), there'll be areas where Dish will try to squeak by with a low-band-only build, and *those* are the areas they'll be compete more on for spectrum leasing. For areas where there's enough traffic to build out mid-band, Dish may or may not need the extra 600...and those are probably the same areas T-Mobile will have a blanket of n41...so competition for that spectrum may be a bit more tepid, with the winner being whoever has more 600 sites lit since site density will determine capacity. One interesting thing to note here: Boost already sells a phone that's (partially) compatible with Dish's upcoming network: the S20 (n66 and n71). In pure dollar terms, they're subsidizing that phone the most our of their entire lineup, selling it at $720. Still spendy, but at least they'll have *some* phones in the field that support the new network, and as time goes on they'll be able to sell the S20 for cheaper. Assuming they're okay with folks dropping down to T-Mobile LTE for voice since the X55 modem can't do VoNR, and sitting primarily on n71 because the phone can't aggregate NR-NR. It's probably worthwhile for them to get a variant of the S20 recertified with n70, as that's adjacent to bands 66 and 25 so radio performance should still be fine. That would give the S20 access to their full native mid-band network on a phone most likely to be picked up by the folks who'd use the most data on their network. With all that said, I would *not* expect Dish to pick up any more 5G phones until they're able to get one with an X60 or equivalent modem; having a network spread across slices of five bands from the get-go means NR-NR aggregation is important, and it'll take VoNR to keep phones from dropping down to roaming on TMo to make phone calls. So I don't expect Boost will get the A51 5G or A71 5G...better to sell LTE-only phones and then introduce phones with better chipsets later, to avoid heavily subsidizing phones twice. Then, once you've got a $400 phone with VoNR, sell bundle it with two months of unlimited-everything service and you're off to the races. I figure we'll be at that point by this time next year, at which point I'll probably pick that phone up to see what Dish's network is like...as long as they allow tethering at full speed.

If I had to guess, they'll deploy just enough to meet their federally mandated requirements (70% of the US population within ~3 years), based on where the concentration of their Boost Mobile customer usage is. They've got a sweetheart roaming/MVNO agreement with T-Mobile for seven years so there will be a ton of places it won't make sense to build out. They'll deploy with 600 MHz in those areas first, since that'll be the quickest way to satisfy the buildout requirements...plus 700 downlink. AWS deployments will probably start with the same cell sites, but i expect there'll be AWS-only sites in cities as that's one fewer set of radios to set up and I'm convinced Dish will build this network as cheaply as they possibly can.

The nice thing about T-Mo's 5G network though is that there shouldn't be a burning need to aggregate NR, with the exception of areas where their 2.5 holdings are chopped up into smaller channels due to licensing weirdness (which to my knowledge is a relatively small chunk of territory). Since NR channels can be 40/60 MHz, you just plop one of those channels down in 2.5 and have a significant amount of capacity to play with, while n71 is left for folks who aren't close enough to the cell for n41, similar to how T-Mobile prioritizes B71 right now. If T-Mobile wants to fill in more speed in areas with contiguity issues, they can add B41 channels (which they're already doing in some areas). B41 is less efficient of course, but virtually every Sprint phone can use it, as well as plenty of T-Mobile phones, so they can push more users to T-Mobile primary without making (more of) a hash of their network. At some point of course, they'll want more capacity in areas where they don't have enough contiguous spectrum to just make a bigger NR carrier, but the X60 will have dropped by then...sounds like it could actually wind up in the iPhone 12 series.

For a bit there, the S20 series were the only current-gen-5G capable phones on Sprint, so the LG and now OnePlus variants came in late enough in the game that you can safely assume their numbers were <100k combined. Remember that Sprint has been pushing the S20 series *hard* with discounts, so they're selling like hotcakes (I'm sure they're above 500k for the entire line at this point). As for the folks getting the first-gen 5G phones, 75K total is actually pretty decent for a network that was only lit in a few markets, with no timeline for elsewhere. I'm curious about what Verizon's numbers are at this point. Their current mmWave network almost certainly covers less territory than Sprint's 41+41 network did, and they aren't discounting their phones any because they don't have a burning need to push folks to the new network like Sprint does. Going to guess that, despite being a larger carrier, they still haven't cracked 500k 5G phone sales. Wouldn't be surprised if AT&T hasn't either.

That's gotta be a typo. The A71 5G lists B24 support rather than B25...24 is L band, which I've seen used by precisely no one in the US. It's also marked as an LTE band for native service rather than roaming, alongside 26 and 41. $10 says that's a typo for B25.

Works fine for me and I have the update that rolled out within the last 48 hours.