iansltx

Hopefully the mid-range Aquos phone ends up in the $250-$300 price range, priced for market penetration rather than luxury. If carriers are going all-in with the whole phone installment deal, they need to get phones on the market that don't increase customers' bills by $30 per month to pay the device off. Looking at you, Apple.

Depends on the area. Around here they're fine. Not amazing everywhere, but with the 800 overlay I can make calls and surf in areas where reception for voice is iffy on other carriers, and data is only available because those guys have 700-band LTE. And in the few places where B41 is turned on and not obscured by the wall of a building, Sprint's neck and neck on data speeds with anyone else. But, just like anyone else, my experience here isn't indicative of the condition of their network nationwide.

...and we're on the same page there. I'm not enthused at the thought of having to fight for new-customer promos in order to keep wireless bills competitive. That's already standard practice on the wireline ISP side, when you're lucky enough to have two competitive ISPs. In contrast, "third pipe" providers tend to have "set it and forget it" pricing, and that in itself is a value proposition.

I can switch to the plan right now if I wanted to; I've been out of contract for a bit now. However Sprint's new-customer promos are what make this plan really attractive, and I can't get those unless I do some crazy port-around bit. It's my understanding that the line fee rebate until 2016 is a new customer only promotion. I don't really care about the 2GB per line of extra data, but those line fees do add up. That extra $75 per month penalty because I have Sprint now is what has me annoyed. Or, put another way, for the privilege of adding four family members onto my existing Sprint account, I "get to" pay Sprint $1125 more between now and January 2016, vs. new customers. If that's the deal I'm offered, I'll decline.

Depends on how much Sprint discounts smartphones going forward when you get 'em with a contract. Remember that the two-year contract price up front is non-zero. The break-even point is $360 of subsidy rather than $360 of phone value. So, you're right, a $200 S5 is a better deal on-contract for lower-end plans, but a $300 S5 wouldn't be.

Here's the thing: the $100 promo is quite good if you've got even three lines, because of the extra stuff Sprint adds on top for new customers: 2GB of extra data per line, and no access fees until 2016...and I'm sure they'll have some new promo to take advantage of at that point. By comparison, T-Mobile's offer drops to 4GB around the same time frame, though I think TMo will actually let you use their new plan as an existing customer. Now, if you're talking about existing customers, Sprint loses out: the access alone are $100 for four lines. If you're comparing to VZW and AT&T, you get double the data at $160 for four lines, but for those same four lines there's no price point between 4GB and 20GB the way the access fee is structured. Then again, VZW and AT&T pull the same crap at the lower tiers, except worse (you have to get 2GB of data on VZW to actually come out cheaper than 10GB). Really though, Sprint is pretending that it isn't competing with T-Mobile. Again. Yeah, have fun with that.

It's on the FAQ page, in the image, third bullet.

I will say though that it's nice that Sprint is *finally* including a tethering allotment on their data buckets with this plan. Non-unlimited Framily plans didn't have that, and that's the one thing other family members (Ting) have over what my account can do without rooting my phone.

Hopefully the new individual plans are a few bucks better than the new family one...and hopefully they're better even for existing customers. The 20GB stolen-customer promo is awesome but I can't qualify because I'm pretty sure Sprint won't consider Ting to be a competitive carrier...and the Ting account is registered under my name so I'd probably have to do some weird port thing to bring my own line under the new account. Of course, if I *could* actually get the stolen-customer plan I'd sign up for it in a heartbeat. But $175 != $100, and it doesn't make a ton of sense to switch only part of the family away from Ting.

Re: Apple and B41, they have B26, B25 and B13, which are all single-carrier bands. Phone tech has advanced a bit singe the 5s/5c so they can probably add another band in there. I'd say that the Nexus 5 already has this but it's missing B13. Hopefully these big price drops will end up with at least unlimited talk/text with 3GB tether-able web for $50/mo. I can dream about them having unlimited at that price since I could get exactly that with Voyager Mobile but Voyager has no way of doing tethering, and I'm sure no roaming. Whatever the price drops end up being, looking forward to moving off of my SERO-P plan and onto something that won't have folks looking askance at me every time I mention the plan I have

My guess is that, like Straight Talk, Wal-Mart asked Sprint/VMo to come up with an exclusive plan for them, in return for having non-negative margin on stuff. *shrugs*

AFAIK the rest of my family (all on Ting) couldn't data roam on VZW or USCC in western NC this past week. Voice and SMS worked fine though, as expected. Re: Custom, I just checked and it'd save my family (four lines, ~1K minutes, ~1k texts, 1-2GB data) on the order of $5 per month, depending on the month. Now, it might allow one of my brothers to stream Pandora or the like as much as he wants, but then he'd have to give up my hand-me-down GS3. For that matter, to get LTE phones every family member would have to pay $130 per phone again. So no sense in switching to Custom, particularly since Custom doesn't have tri-band phones yet.

When I was in the airport today an LTE-only cycle back to LTE + CDMA on my Nexus 5 got me onto B41. Regualr LTE (B26) was okay (vs. the last time I went through ATL), but where I could get it at above -116 RSRP B41 was pretty nice, at ~20 Mbps down and 5-10 Mbps up. Now, T-Mobile was nicer at basically 20M symmetric but it's nice to see things working much better in the airport (I was in concourses B and C).

Was in Chattanooga twice, roughly a week apart, with the second time ending this morning. Didn't see band 26 LTE anywhere, but HD voice was available, and LTE was solid except at the airport. Also saw an Ericsson truck parked outside our hotel last night, so my guess is that they've got folks on the ground in CHA turning up B26, or maybe even B41.

Am I the only one who's got Android L on their N5? Installed it last Friday. A couple apps are wonky or defunct (Slack, Facebook), but things are getting a bit better. And battery life is maybe slightly better than on 4.4.x, even though I was using ART on those versions as well. It's sad though that I can't view the LTE Engineering screen..."Service Programu has stopped" won't let me. I know L has a new radio with it, and at one point I was able to see the screen to know that B26 was connecting just fine...but not anymore

Now, if only Sprint could get eCSFB working on the B41 tower(s) near me. I can hit 35 Mbps or so in LTE-only mode (just checked), but can't connect to the site if I tell my phone that it needs to do voice as well as data. B26 and B25 are widely available, but it'd be nice if network load was spread a bit more evenly so B26 would be less congested in-building.

For what it's worth, Sprint was selling phones with 1x in SMR before they were selling phones with LTE. So my guess is that the majority of Sprint phones at this point can use 1x800 service if it's available. That in and of itself may free up a 1x carrier worth of capacity where more than one is being used in 1900. Now, counting guard bands, three contiguous 1xRTT or 1xEV channels take up 5x5 MHz. You can stack another four in there to bring the total to 10x10. Sprint has various specturm configurations, but 5x5 + 10x10 and 15x15 are relatively common. It's in Sprint's interest to get down to three 1x + EvDO carriers in PCS, then make sure they're contiguous with each other, so that in either case they've got room to drop a couple 5x5 LTE carriers in band 2 territory. That's partially why you're seeing pretty cheap off-contract LTE devices on Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile...you don't want phones using EvDO when they could be moving the network toward lower EvDO traffic.

For all of the flak that Ericsson gets, I've seen 35+ Mbps down on a 5x5 LTE carrier with them. That's close to the spec'd limit...and that was with a real-world device, outside lab conditions. They also have a pretty nice B26 LTE blanket here. Oh, and HD voice, and 1x800. Yes, it took 'em comparatively forever to make all that happen, but I was okay with the 4G-only upgrades 'til late last year because my S III took 'em in stride. That said, I want me some NSN B41 TD-LTE. I've seen what they can do on the T-Mobile side (25ms LTE pings anyone?) so I'm pretty excited about what'll happen with Sprint once I can get access to the dang network.

Nothing new, but in-market HD voice seems to be working a good portion of the time here in Austin. Funny how 12.85 kbps with rock-solid QoS can sound better than 32+ kbps over the wide Internet. For what it's worth, at the very least the Galaxy Victory can transmit HD voice, as can the ZTE Awe (or is it the Reef? not 100% sure). Not sure yet if those phones have the added HD voice clarity on the receive side, but on my N5 you can certainly tell the difference.

Add me to the list of folks who got the force-update. Looks like my phone isn't camping on B26 quite as much, though I did go in and re-prioritize LTE bands just now so that 26 is at the bottom where it should be...since the 4.4.3 upgrade I've been on B26 more often than not.

I wonder how far down Band 41 is on the priority list around here...my phone tends to camp on B26 now (though it may take an airplane mode toggle to get there) but haven't seen B41 even though I know it's live in a few areas.