iansltx

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.

Confirmed that VoLTE works perfectly on the S20, whether provisioned for Sprint-only (Ting) or T-Mobile/Sprint (Sprint postpaid), running on Sprint's core network. Two S20s on VoLTE will use what Samsung's dailer calls HD+ calling, though it may take a second or two to bump up to the highest-bandwidth codec after the call starts from what I can tell. Just read up on this a bit and I guess HD+ runs at up to 48 KHz, which tracks with that I was hearing...I've experienced HD voice on older devices over the CDMA network and this seemed a good bit clearer. Call stability is superior to Duo, I'm sure due to network traffic prioritization (and, in the case I'm testing with, the call never actually leaving Sprint's network, vs. having to bounce out to Google).

I spent Friday evening through Sunday morning in an area with 20 MHz of T-Mobile spectrum deployed: 10x10 of B71, 10x10 of B2. Confirmed when driving back from there (Brackettville) that T-Mobile puts Sprint's network ahead of B71 priority-wise. Also confirmed that AT&T is running MFBI on their sites (PCS -> B25, CLR -> B26) to facilitate Sprint roaming; on US 90 west of Uvalde both T-Mobile and Sprint were nonexistent for maybe ten miles. In Uvalde, T-Mobile B2 was weak and overloaded, while Sprint had B41 there. For those wondering what this has to do with NR, the tower east of Brackettville has it, so maybe ten minutes outside Brackettville I was sitting on B2 + n71. At that point, I was seeing 15 MHz of n71 + 10 MHz of B71. I got a number of decent speedtests along that route, in contrast to basically everything east of NW San Antonio on 410, where n71 is overloaded and even throwing 20 MHz of B66, among other things, at customers still isn't enough to keep the network fast. But in those same areas B41 was solid, with the usual 70-100 Mbps speeds, so all TMo needs to do is throw n41 on those same sites and they'll be set. While coming back this morning I got my best upload speed test ever on mobile:https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/6228326864. I want to say this was on 10 MHz of n71, plus 20 MHz of B66 and maybe some B2 in there. This was on 410 just west of where it intersects with I-10 north of town. Yes, I double-checked to make sure I hadn't found an n41 tower, but if I had download speeds would've been higher anyway. I may post more updaets later. Chewed up plenty of data running speedtests while riding shotgun. It's great seeing how an unloaded network performs, even on relatively narrow channels...which is something I can't really experience here in town.

Apparently it'll be the successor to the S10 Lite. So something that slots in between the A71 and the S20. https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-galaxy-s20-fan-edition-launch-1132248/ From other articles I've seen, it'll have 5G in the US, and my guess is that T-Mobile will pick it up. If it's the same size/smaller than the A71, should fill a hole in the lineup nicely. That said, not in a hurry to see it, as having that in the lineup might make it easier to justify the S20 costing more than the $750 I just paid for one 😛

The S20 I ordered is now running on Ting/Sprint. VoLTE was off by default but worked perfectly, including HD calling, when turned on. That phone shows the LTE+ icon when on B41, where mine shows the thinner-lettered generic LTE icon in the same situation. T-Mobile roaming doesn't appear to exist...forcing T-Mo bands grants no service. For where she uses her phone, this won't be an issue, but it'll be interesting to see how long it takes before MVNOs get T-Mobile roaming. FWIW the SIM I got from Ting was a Boost/Virgin branded model. I wonder (but doubt) if Ting/Sprint customers will technically belong to Sprint as of 7/1.

Party's over for loaned spectrum in Austin. NR is down to 10x10 and LTE is down to 5x5 in band 71.

I have family in Fredericksburg and Kerrville. T-Mobile having anything beyond 2G is a relatively recent occurrence, and they skipped directly from 2G to LTE on PCS when heading out to Fredericksburg. Sprint was actually the first provider with both EvDO (definitely by early 2007) and LTE (late 2012 I think?) in Fredericksburg, and they've had B41 on their central tower there for awhile. Sprint has had coverage along 290 between Austin and Fredericksburg, and even west of there, for quite awhile, and as I recall B26 has made that coverage more continuous vs. dropping to EvDO/1x. I noticed my phone roaming on T-Mobile at the beginning of May while at the top of Enchanted Rock, so obviously stuff's improving, but TMo service was *rough* the last time I tried it closer to town. Wouldn't be surprised if Sprint and TMo used the same core towers in that area. But Sprint definitely got there first...at least for anything more than GSM.

Samsung logo on power-off. Phone model info, then Samsung logo along for boot. My guess is that both animations are now identical to the unlocked version, and I'll be able to confirm this on Thursday.

T-Mobile network performance on their standard preferred bands seems to be getting worse here, despite not losing any 600 spectrum yet. Sprint is holding up nicely, so I have my phone set to only connect to 25/26/41 for the time being. B71 seems to be a bit better if I lock onto it. I'll be heading down 35 on Friday, through San Antonio, and out west of there for a few days. Where I'll be is in a fringe area for NR by the looks of it, though it has strong Sprint coverage. It'll be my first real test of a mostly-unloaded NR network once I get past San Antonio, so it'll be interesting to see if service is good enough to not lock onto Sprint for most of the trip.

Got a software update this morning. Sprint boot/power-off logo is gone. Security patch level is now June. Not noticing any other differences yet.

FYI, Microsoft's store has the S20 for $750 right now, and the S20+ for $900. I just picked up an S20 for my mom (she'll be keeping her unlimited talk + text + 20GB of data plan on Ting) now that I've confirmed that the S20 is a solid phone/worth the price. I figure the phone won't get much cheaper for awhile, and this should last her for a good three years In other news, at least in my area T-Mobile refuses to carrier-aggregate B71 with...well...anything. Now, this may be because they have two 10x10 carriers in B66 and two in PCS here, but it looks like they'll aggregate 2+4/66+12, despite 12 being a mere 5x5 channel (B71 is 15x15 right now). Maybe they're keeping B71 free for indoor coverage or something.

Yeah, no need to deal with small cells if you can avoid it. Without 2.5, it's tougher because the spectrum you've got is finite, particularly when 600/700/800 have to be run in "provide as much coverage as you can" mode. With 2.5, you can just throw spectrum at the problem...and propagation on 2.5 isn't bad at all, to the point that throwing it toward the top of a larger macro tower actually makes sense. Whereas you'd never do that with mmWave. I'm biased here because most of the places I go are dense enough for 2.5, depending on how high up you put the radios, but not dense enough to make sense for small cells, but there are plenty of places like that. Meanwhile, when you *do* get into urban cores, you can throw LAA and a denser 2.5 network at the problem, and statistically enough people will have mmWave-capable phones (in a few years) to meaningfully offload from the macro network. So things work out nicely.

So, the Galaxy A71 5G will be available this Friday, running $600 at full price, or significantly less via lease or promos. Still not *cheap*, but well down-market of the OP8/S20, so the "please switch to 5G" subsidy can be less while getting more people on the network. The A51 5G will also be out this summer, and that'll sell at a discount vs. the A71. I'm betting we see the A51 crack $500, as the non-3G version is under $300. Both the A51 and the A71 support n41, so that band won't be the province of flagships for long at all.

Dial *#0011# and see what that info says. You may not have actually had 5G, as the indicator will show up when the anchor band is available. If you went into the car wash, you probably dropped from B2/66 (which can serve as an anchor band) to B12 (which can't). Now, if you're pulling 413/51 on "band 2", that sounds like n41 with band 2 as the anchor.

Oh, it's definitely a huge fine to pay. The intention is getting a 4th mobile carrier out of this, and I'd personally rather it be dish if they get their darned network deployed. They actually have plenty of spectrum of their own, and have it spec'd for largely unpaired use on the AWS side, so with NR-SA they could have some pretty phenomenal speeds. If they ever. Freaking. Deploy. Their. Network.

Hot take for y'all: if DIsh doesn't come to an agreement to buy Boost, they should be forced to lease their spectrum to whoever does, indefinitely. Because we all know that, given the option, Dish will sit on their spectrum and do precisely nothing useful with it for years. Right up until they're forced to loan it to someone who actually has a network.

As long as T-Mobile pulls stuff over to NR I'm fine with Sprint losing B41 and even B25 (the G block isn't going anywhere) in favor of T-Mobile NR. That's why I bought a 5G phone. I doubt there'll be an extended period where they take spectrum from one (other than the 5G shutdown) to push to the other.