iansltx

Ordered an S20 today; should be here Monday. Also switched to a plan that has 50GB of MHS rather than 3GB. I figure I got the best deal that'll be available for quite awhile. Will post back here when I'm able to put the phone through its paces...including in an area 3/4 mi from here that's basically a Sprint dead zone. EDIT: Somehow it's on the truck for delivery already. Guessing T-Mo/Sprint are farming out their logistics to UPS, including warehousing, 'cuz my phone was on a plane within a few hours of being marked as shipped.

Just got off the phone with a Sprint Business rep. According to him the cell site nearest me is now running n41. Which explains why my LTE-41 speeds are a fraction of what they were a few months back. He mentioned a pretty awesome deal on an S20 if I sign a contract, with a $10 price increase per month in exchange for going from 3 GB of hotspot to 50 GB (which I've wanted anyway), so chances are good I'll bump up to the S20. Apparently it's still a Business Fusion plan so I don't have to pay $$$ extra per month for the phone either. Anyone heard of a $55/mo (or $75/mo) Business Fusion plan with 50GB of hotspot? Any video/VPN throttling to speak of there?

Not that I'll be near the Dolphins stadium, but I'll be in Miami (at/near the airport) Wednesday night. Will be interesting to see how the LTE network performs once the town is back to normal, which it should be by then.

Got back from Belgium a little over a week ago...same areas as last time, but my data passes overlapped with time I spent at the airport so I was able to test B7 a bit more. Proximus again as the provider. Top speed was 141/21.5 at the airport, with 165ms to Omaha. 50-65 Mbps down, 4-18 Mbps up, with as little as 115ms latency on B3/B20, with B20 seeming to be a bit stronger this time around than last time. Exact same phone, albeit with a newer Android release, so pretty much an apples-to-apples comparison.

Bought a week pass when at the Munich airport coming in for the trip I'm now returning from. Vodafone in the MUC airport, with a mix of B20, B3, and B7. The former two were 20/10 or so speeds, the latter Around 60/30. Coverage was rather spotty at the Sofia airport, but once I got landside, coverage in and near Sofia was solid, using A1's B3 network. A1, the largest carrier in the country (by a small margin), is apparently trial'ing 3500 MHz 5G-NR, and their network was quite strong at the conference center (National Palace of Culture) and nearby, with speeds reaching 129/27 and about 160ms latency. Carrier aggregation is being used. Travelled to Plovdiv, where speeds were 30-40 down, 10-20 up. On the way there, and on the way between there and somewhere else we went for a wine tasting, things would sometimes drop to HSPA, at which point no data would pass. But I had LTE most.of the time. I definitely did too many speedtests though...at 4 and change GB I got throttled to 2 Mbps in each direction in Bulgaria, and maybe 1 Mbps in Germany. I'll definitely only buy day passes the next time I head out of the country, but even throttling data was still reasonable.

Android 10 update just dropped today for folks who have a Sprint SIM installed. I hit >200 Mbps for the first time with the update installed on B41, as well as >400 Mbps over WiFi.

The setup appears to differ depending on the country. In Serbia I switched to the non-primary roaming partner Sprint has there, and it worked like a charm (manual network selection). I swapped back to the primary later, likewise with no issue. In Belgium I was locked to one network AFAIK; no other network would auth. In the UK I *think* I could only access one network basically the entire time, but oddly enough someone else here reported that they roamed on a completely different network. Odd...

On the plus side, data passes run at full LTE speed, and include unlimited tethering. On the downside, traffic is airpinned back through the US (so you get a few hundred ms higher latency) and the carrier Sprint has a partnership with in your area may not be the best carrier there (though for Belgium at least it actually is the primary AFAIK).

By contrast, the credit card I used over there worked fine without consulting with Chase. Maybe because I booked the flight to there via their travel portal, but I'm not complainin'.

Sitting on my return flight from Belgrade figured I'd write up my roaming experience. I was here to speak at a conference (PHP Serbia) and the organizers gave folks Vip Mobile SIMs, but I elected to keep my Sprint SIM in and use some high speed day passes instead. Mainly so I didn't forget to swap my own SIM back in, and because that way I could do WiFi calling (which worked well). Here, you have your choice of Telenor (the default when I landed) or Vip Mobile (which I switched to shortly thereafter). Both have B3 and B20 LTE, but it seemed like Vip had better service in Belgrade, sort of like T-Mobile. That said, the hotel I was in was in the shadow of a cell site so service was a bit spotty, and the conference venue was built well enough to have iffy cell service as well. So I used WiFi in both locations, as well as the airport to a large extent One interesting thing is that my bank rejects Serbian IP addresses...fair enough, I guess...so the VPN provided by Sprint's roaming was handy.

Your assumption is correct. That particular line supports HD voice, which is why I went with it.

You call it, you speak, it echoes back what you're saying.

Probably old news as well, but I did see an LTE -> WiFi handoff for a call I was on earlier this evening. EDIT: Apologies to folks on this thread for lack of reading-the-previous-posts-comprehension and combativeness about "I swear this is VoLTE".

I don't have any Calling+ branding on this phone, and this just went live today...or within the past few days. Silly question, but which apps do I need to confirm, and do they need root?

Just called the echo line at 925-259-0082 and the call went over LTE and sounded markedly clearer than a standard call. Switched to VoWiFi and quality was similar there. Latency was comparable across both connections...maybe slightly better on LTE...which is impressive given that I can hit Sprint's speedtest server in <20ms from here on the connection that's providing WiFi.

Made a call earlier this afternoon and noticed the ringing sounded a bit different. Checked and the call was running VoLTE on my PH-1. Confirmed this with another call or two shortly thereafter. Double-confirmed since I was getting notifications in the background while on the call with WiFi turned off. Call was to someone roaming on VZW so I can't yet say whether HD voice can kick in.

They wouldn't even need to drop 800's LTE. Remember that post-merger they'll have B12 and B71 available for 5G. Carving out an extra 5 MHz won't buy much, compared to the 20 MHz FD in 600. I'm going to guess Sprint will cut PCS CDMA 12/31/21, with an extra year for 800. Could be EOY 2021 for everything depending on when the merger happens. The issue right now is that they still haven't launched VoLTE so who knows even how much traffic they can shunt away from CDMA with the phones that are in the field right now.

A day and a half (and my second $5 day pass) into my time here in Belgium and things seem to be working well. Proximus is the carrier I'm roaming on, with no ability to pick anything else from the times I've tried. Latency is as low as 175ms to Chicago, though there's a bunch of jitter. Speed-wise, I've seen as much as 96M down, 26.5M up on Band 3 (1800), though that was right outside the airport. Coverage is pretty good, though indoors there's a good chance I'm sitting on B20 (Digital Dividend 800), which is pretty crowded on the downlink (I've seen 7M down, 18M up) rather than B3...though that's not a foregone conclusion. SMS works basically the same as native Sprint, though it looks like From phone numbers have country codes appended when they normally wouldn't. Connectivity is good enough that voice calls on Duo work well. Tethering has been an absolute lifesaver as hotel WiFi at a tech conference is always a crapshoot. EDIT: I saw B7 at the airport but didn't bother grabbing another day pass to speed test. Overall, was super satisfied with roaming performance while in Belgium.

As of 7:15a local time on Thursday, I'll be in Belgium for a few days. I'll be grabbing high-speed data passes while there, so I should be able to report authoritatively on connectivity. Looks like the roaming partners are Proximus (the primarily state-owned telecom, #1 by subscriber count) for LTE, with #3 BASE as a fallback (which appears not to have LTE roaming?!?). From my last jaunt, I know my Essential phone will pick up B3 and B20, which Proximus uses, so I'm betting service will be every bit as good as I get at home (albeit with roaming latency and ridiculous per-minute charges).

Huh. I'll have to do some more testing. I know TMo can hit 100+ Mbps in some places here, though where I'm sitting right now isn't one of those places. The relative speed test consistency I saw across B2 and B4 made me thin there's throttling going on, at least in this market, but I may be wrong.

Dropped 25/26/41 and, after a bit of delay (and having to restart 3x because each band drop/add requires a restart), locked onto B4 and B2 on T-Mobile. Looks like LTE roaming is treated similarly to international roaming in terms of routing (latency was 130-150ms with a huge amount of jitter), plus speed throttling at ~3 Mbps down plus a bit of overprovisioning. Upload speeds don't appear to be throttled; was seeing 6-7 Mbps, which iirc is about right for this particular location.

This was with my PH-1. Zero fiddling with MSL, ##DATA#, etc. Though...y'know what...let's see if 4636'ing to LTE only and turning off 25/26/41 puts my on TMo here.

Phone locked onto T-Mobile B2 earlier tonight in a bit of a Sprint dead zone. Appeared that speeds were throttled. Service ended up bouncing over to native B26 but looks like Sprint isn't disallowing in-market roaming. There are a few other dead zones around here so I'll report back if I see more of this.

Nice to see the tons of info here. Re: VZW's $75 hotspot plan, mind linking info for that? Have one area in mind that is on satellite right now but has a VZW tower quite close, but otherwise poor mobile reception. This would save them a decent chunk of change vs. ViaSat and get a better quality connection.

Grabbed the Prime Exclusive version of this phone for $180 apiece for two family members who needed upgrades from aging HTC One A9s. Ting SIMs are sitting at their place, to be installed tomorrow, but from initial setup this is seems like a really solid midrange phone even a year on. I'll be able to compare RF with my OG Pixel and PH-1 tomorrow, but the phone is running Android 8.1 with the October security patches despite being based on an Amazon OS image. From the sound of it it'll get Pie Q1 '19.