iansltx

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.

Still in Austin. I'll explore a bit more tomorrow I think. Maybe I'm just reading the maps wrong

So apparently B26 is actually live near me. Speeds aren't great but the service works pretty well, and it looks like my phone prefers to camp there. Maybe I need to check my settings though

My Nexus 5 is temporarily out of commission...AOT-compiling all of my apps after what appears to have been a successful 4.4.3 update :-). I have TWRP on my phone so when the OTA rebooted me I landed there. Just had to turn off signature verification, run the lone zip file in /cache, and wait for the phone to do its thing. There's no B26 for a several-mile radius around me, but there should be plenty of B41 at this point, so hopefully I'll have a favorable report on how the phone performs radio-wise...and hopefully I'll get a bit better battery life than I was getting a day or three ago.

eCSFB appears to be fixed now on the tower near me. LTE speeds are back to where they should be, and I'm not getting the signal-searching issues that I was before. So that's good.

I'd say "I'll post the firmware image up as soon as I get it" but my phone is rooted, so that probably won't happen. But if someone finds a link, I'll put the file up for direct download. Looking forward to this, because there are a few B41 towers in the area that I'd love to reliably latch onto (right now despite the band priorirty change my phone doesn't wanna do that).

So, I'm back from my field test( and lunch). Looks like rebooting the hotspot near a Band 41 site will get it to lock onto that site, though otherwise the hotspot will sit on Band 25 ad infinitum. Now I'm not completely sure that I was hitting a B41 site during the second part of my testing (the Mingle's info screens are less descriptive than the Zing's), but I did hit ~23 Mbps down, ~8 Mbps up in an area where B25 should be pretty heavily used, and I know there's a B41 site very close by. I also connected to a B41 site in a B25 coverage hole and got mediocre speeds (8-9 Mbps). Probably the site's fault though there. The device was showing full bars after a reboot (vs. almost no signal before). Interestingly, my Karma hotspot delivered 12-13 Mbps off of the same site (Karma's firmware is better than the stock Clearwire FW, where I couldn't get past about 8.6 Mbps a year or two ago).

Just keep in mind that Virgin's offerings are inferior to Sprint's price-wise, and you can get the home router with no contract. Though if you're on the 6GB plan with both services, it'll take ten months or so (maybe more with taxes on the Sprint side) for the lower up-front cost of Virgin to be offset by higher monthly fees. Then there's the fact that 6GB of data isn't that much when you're connecting to a real computer. But if you're okay with that, the Mingle is an option.

Yep, I have yet another hotspot as part of my collection. The Mingle appears to be the Zing/771S, but with no touch screen and cheaper materials; there are a few info screens that you access on-device by pressing the power button. The web UI is pretty much the same as the Zing's, and the dual antenna jacks are still there. Wired tethering on my mac complained of an outdated driver, but after a reboot connected anyway, netting me 16M down, 6M up at my apartment. I'm headed out to near a confirmed TDD-LTE site to check out top speeds (and burn through my 250MB of data). Like the Mingle and the MiFi 500, there's only one WiFi antenna in the device, limiting peak connection speed to 72 Mbps, and real-world transfer speeds to a fraction of that. The device was $99.99 + tax from Virgin Mobile's website. One of the more interesting plans I saw as a $120/6 month/6GB plan. Expensive per gigabyte, but a little less expensive per month than the standard $25/1.5GB plan. You're basically paying $65 to keep your data active for five more months than usual; $55 is what the 6GB one-month plan costs.

Looks like the issue has spread to Austin as well (x-post alert): http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/5709-lg-google-nexus-5-users-thread/?p=306448

My N5 is a sad puppy at the moment...I don't know what's with the towers around here, but for the past few days I'm lucky if I get a solid data signal unless I force my phone to 1x. Text messages have issues as well. My T-Mobile SIM doesn't have these issues. Will edit this post if my Moto X has the same issues or not. EDIT: No confirmation quite yet, but looks like a serious problem with eCSFB in my area. Will be checking with the X once Republic Wireless decides to let me.

Sprint awhile back used MMDS, I believe on the same spectrum they're using now for WiMAX/TD-LTE. Which would explain the propagation issues.