iansltx

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.

Yeah, at this point the merger looks to be a question of when, not if. There are *still* a number of places around here where T-Mobile feels like they're waiting on a merger to get decent service, unless they've done something absolutely amazing with 600 in those areas. But, as stated, T-Mobile's ISP ambitions are all about that 2.5 GHz spectrum...which Sprint has. Chuck some 5G Massive MIMO antennas on one end of the connection and a 256x64QAM HPUE outdoor CPE on the other side and all you'll be competing with is fiber, cable, or other carriers' 5G. Sell for $50/mo and you aren't even competing with cable at this point. And yes, this would work swimmingly with Dish's installer network (and with a triple play of either IPTV or satellite).

I've started seeing 10+ Mbps upload speeds on B41 when I was seeing 6-7 Mbps before, max. I'm going to attribute this to 64QAM. Also lower latencies. Upload speeds still aren't quite as good as prior to the TD reconfig from awhile back, but I'll take it. I have a feeling Austin isn't on the 225-city list though, otherwise I'd have seen higher download speeds as well; I'm still topping out at ~110 Mbps here.

I'm currently on the light rail to the Edinburgh airport, ending a few days in the UK. Figure now's as good a time as any to post my experiences while using Global Roaming here. Note that my experience covers only London-Heathrow and Edinburgh between the airport and the Holyrood building, with a little bit of north-south in there. Used my Essential Phone for this. The most important bit first: Global Roaming includes tethering, and works on LTE in the UK! Traffic is proxied through Omaha so there's a significant latency penalty but calling via Duo (audio and video) worked fine wherever I had a decent signal. I did a few speed tests throughout the trip, but this one at the base of Edinburgh Castle at the top of the Royal Mile was the best one: Check out my Speedtest result! How fast is your internet? https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/4318190569 I was on O2 effectively the entire time; I saw Vodafone once on GPRS (!) but otherwise it was a crapshoot whether I had service indoors, despite 800 MHz being available on the network and my phone (B20). I saw a mix of B1 and B20 in Edinburgh, plus some B3 at Heathrow. I saw HSPA (still O2) once on the trip from the airport. Point being, you'll want a phone that does B20 to get reasonable LTE coverage when roaming in the UK with Sprint. Judicious use of the fact that day passes are a full 24 hours meant that three day passes got me enough high speed data to cover my needs for my four day trip (I didn't need high speed data this morning due to plenty of WiFi). Sprint would text me any time my pass expired with a link to the international portal where I could buy another pass. The first text from the came a few minutes after connecting to O2 after landing in Heathrow, including a notification that calls (of which I made none) would be 20 cents per minute. All in all not a bad experience. Could've been better if Vodafone roaming had been on LTE, or if EE had been a roaming partner, but I'm sure the latter would be a pipe dream given that they're by far the best network in the UK. EDIT: O2 is down to WCDMA/H+ in the Edinburgh airport. WiFi is available though so I just used that. EDIT 2: Caught Band 40 while sitting on the plane about to depart from Heathrow. Sorry, not spending $5 to figure out how fast it is, though even in slow mode it's pretty snappy.

Cool. The PH-1 appears to support all three bands. Guessing the data passes block tethering?

Here's my multi-point theory on why Sprint isn't roaming on VZW for LTE: Fewer Sprint phones have B13 than B12, and at the point that you're roaming on another carrier you want that low-band signal, most of which is still B13 on VZW. VZW charges more for data roaming than AT&T does, and might not even let Sprint do LTE roaming. This is bolstered by the fact that e.g. FreedomPop uses AT&T rather than Verizon as the underlying network for its stuff...they wouldn't use it if it was expensive. Also, add the PH-1 to the list of unlocked/BYOD phones that likely have the same firmware as the Sprint version, and thus get WiFi calling (though the PH-1 doesn't have Calling Plus; fingers crossed that I get VoLTE). I've been in a few RF dead zones (yay hotels!) lately but have seen the phone drop down to native eHRPD rather than swap to roaming on e.g. T-Mo band 12, so my guess is that I won't see aggressive roaming to LTE until the VoLTE soft launch, and maybe not even then.

I'll be heading to the UK in a few months and am trying to figure out whether it's worth it to switch off of Open World (this'll be my first time out of the country, so it's not like I'm using CA/MX data anyway) and grabbing a week pass for while I'm there. Specifically, does anyone know which network Sprint roams on in the UK, and whether it's LTE roaming? If the roaming situation is less than ideal, I figure I'll keep Open World and swing by an EE or Three store to pick up a local SIM, using my 3-cent-per-MB Open World data to get there. But if I can get solid coverage on LTE, I'll gladly do the week pass thing to save the hassle of finding a SIM.

I've had VoLTE on my straight-from-Google OG Pixel, as well as WiFi calling. Carriers can make it work if they feel like doing so. Fingers crossed that my Essential Phone will get VoLTE support. It doesn't have Calling Plus but it does have WiFi calling, and is relatively aggressive about using WiFi calling to boot. Austin LTE is at the point where, as long as QoS is involved properly, VoLTE should work well here.

Welp, since the BYOD bit is a new customer promo only...again...guess I'll stay on my Business Fusion line. I'd totally pay the extra $5 + tax per month for an extra 12GB of tethering, which is also the only time I would use >1080p video anyway, and Hulu + Tidal, but guess Sprint still doesn't like their existing customer base, even though I haven't bought a phone from them since my S III in 2012.

Looks like a nice phone, but while it has B26 and B41 it's missing B25?!? The omission is consistent across two places I checked. Hopefully it's just a misprint, given that it supports Sprint's other two bands. https://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=5720

I'm saying that, given that LTE can do so already, doing so with 5G should be a cakewalk.

Satellite is less outdated than you think. ViaSat has 100 Mbps plans, albeit with a 150 GB soft cap. 50 Mbps is available for a relatively reasonable price, depending on area. Of course, there's still the speed-of-light problem. With that said, 25/3 with a 160GB cap, particularly if it's a soft cap, for like $60/mo,, would be straightforward to sling via 2.5 GHz 5G, and if advertised at all would give Sprint probablh 80% market share in anywhere that can't get cable or fiber. The number of places that can hit those speeds over DSL that can't get cable or fiber is low enough that you don't really have to worry about those folks (basically only rural telephone companies/co-ops do that).

Guess I'll be going back to Pixel-land for my next phone: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-24/andy-rubin-s-phone-maker-essential-is-said-to-consider-sale

Feels kinda silly. This really reads like "Boost founder wants to buy back his company at a discount, which would conveniently happen if Sprint were forced to divest". What *would* be useful as a merger condition is a lock on all MVNO pricing, such that e.g. Ting could keep getting the deal they do right now on each of Sprint and T-Mo once the two merge, valid for, say, five years. Same with Google Fi.

It's not, though. They may not have as much rural 2.5/2.6 due to other small providers having EBS (or, to a smaller extent, BRS), but they have enough out west of here to run 3xCA B41.

At the risk of mentioning something that's been brought up in the previous 46 pages, there's exactly one merger condition I care about...albeit a bit of a stretch: deploy B41 on any macro site that has mid-band LTE on it (AWS or PCS) and is in an area with >= 60 MHz of Sprint-owned BRS + EBS, and serve fixed wireless with the following specs over said network: 25/3 or better with a 160GB or higher cap and $10/50GB or better for overages, using equipment available with both indoor and outdoor variants Given how rich T-Mobile's backhaul network is, how much airlink capacity is available on B41 (particularly with massive MIMO and 5G), this is a softball requirement, and one that Charter is basically already investigating using CBRS and mmWave. I've probably said it before, but if you had to pick a band to dedicate to fixed wireless, BRS/EBS is ideal for that. Local wireless ISPs would kill for the spectrum Sprint uses for B41. Granted, without T-Mo's deep mid-band holdings, Sprint can't really afford to go fixed-only (or fixed-primary) on B41. With the combined portfolios, they absolutely can, given the sheer volume of PCS A-G alone (a few years back one of the staff here added up PCS spectrum availability between Sprint and T-Mobile). Not counting AWS. Not even touching low-band, where T-Mobile is well-positioned of late. Legere and Claure are talking a big game about wireless broadband with their merger announcement, particularly when mentioning cablecos as competitors. Fine; put your network where y'all's mouths are, because large swaths of the US could do with a second (or first) last-mile option that meets the FCC broadband definition without bouncing to a satellite and back. And yes, if I had to, I'd give up the B41 network around here, even though it's actually pretty widely available now and downright speedy (but so is T-Mobile's CA network...50M down and 30M up even when hairpinning through Seattle has me duly impressed).

Going along US-79 between Austin and Longview is a nice test of Sprint's roaming ability. As I type this, I'm on EvDO roaming with VZW; if I had to guess, it's an old Alltel site. Earlier, I was on AT&T LTE (B4 or B17) with VZW or Sprint 1x. The T-Mobile SIM in my tablet is pulling native LTE pretty consistently, bouncing between various bands and CA. Unfortunately this is the last time I'll be doing this trip for quite awhile, so I won't be able to confirm when roaming goes live on that corridor. It'll also be interesting to see what happens in the reverse direction. Though realistically the only roaming available in the other direction for me will be on PCS A-F, assuming the network is set up to properly broadcast Band 2 when the frequencies line up. For high end phones that just so happen to have a single variant cross-carrier B26 should be a nice boost in those places where TMobile hasn't built out yet and Sprint has. EDIT: By the time I finished this message I was split between AT&T LTE and VZW 1x again.

Another 8.1 update came out yesterday. More modem fixes, BT 5.0, and some other stuff. Things do seem to be a bit better than I recall previously. Downtown you can hit either Sprint or Clearwire B41 and usually Clearwire is nigh useless anywhere near peak times, but tonight it was serviceable. I'll post another update the next time I'm in a CLWR-B41 area for an extended period, but it seems like Essential is finally actually getting stuff fixed (though upload speeds are still crap on B41 with lowish signals, rather than falling back to B25 or whatnot).