iansltx

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.

I've seen as low as 20ms on LTE but usually it's 30-60ms. If 5G can hit 20ms with 5ms jitter consistently then it basically is a drop-in for wired connectivity (5ms jitter is about what I see for cable, 20ms last-hop is what I saw with DSL).

Enough capacity improvements to do home broadband over wireless that competes with at least entry level cable tiers (like the one you're on). At least for B41. But better capacity for mobile/better latency are big ones...LTE latency is still a bit above what a wired connection will do and 5G will largely close that gap.

As long as I'm able to get T-Mobile's lower bands, I'm absolutely fine giving up B41, as my phone supports everything but B66 and B71. Particularly if swapping in 5G on B41 gets the home braodband competitor online.

They probably aren't doing down that path because the big two cable providers (Comcast and Spectrum) are both in bed with Verizon, so they aren't willing to cut Sprint a good deal for backhaul because Sprint has nothing to offer in return. By contrast, Altice wants to create their own mobile provider, and they can use Sprint for that, so my guess is that in return for cheap small cell backhaul Sprint is providing them heavily discounted MVNO access. Could be something as aggressive as a reciprocal "we'll charge you a nominal fee for backhaul and power and in return you'll not charge us for any data that our MVNO passes on those cell sites". I'd imagine Cox is thinking along the same lines.

Meh, there are plenty of MM sites toward downtown, though the small cell placement battle is almost certainly why we're not an AT&T 5G launch market. Sprint still seems to be doing upgrades on existing sites, effectively all of which are standard macros or MMs. One of the former is ~1500 ft from where I live, and I hit 130M down, 10.5M up on a speed test a few nights ago, which is a personal high score for downloads on Sprint, as well as on uploads since the TD change.

Have I been living under a rock, with other folks reporting upload CA on Sprint? Was pretty sure that wasn't a thing yet. Also, with upload CA I'd expect a slightly larger speed boost vs. the ~50% I'm seeing right now (which is about right for the 16QAM -> 64QAM bump).

November security patch is out. Thought I'd have to wait a few days for it but just got the update notification. It's almost as if Sprint doesn't care enough to hold the update back and is just rubber-stamping anything Essential sends them. Which...I'm not complaining.