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Remember that TMo can add LTE in PCS A-F whenever they feel like it, as long as they start pushing devices that support the band into the channel around the same time. If the next round of devices, the ones with 700A support, don't have LTE in PCS and VoLTE support I'll be very surprised. That's germane to this discussion because real-world LTE capacity per 5MHz are 30+ Mbps, where it's more like 17 Mbps per 5 MHz on HSPA+, if you're really lucky. More like 14 Mbps most of the time. So T-Mobile can keep its network fast for a bit longer. Though Sprint will meet or beat 20x20 with 20 + 20 TD-LTE soon enough.

Hopefully (fingers crossed) T-Mobile uses 700A to expand rural coverage a bit. I wouldn't expect 700-only sites...more like Sprint NV where coverage "naturally" falls from high-band to low-band as you get further from the site (in T-Mobile's case that's AWS -> PCS -> 700, or maybe just AWS -> 700). But the extra coverage of 700A, plus potential roaming revenue from US Cellular and the like (yes, I could see a time when USCC data-roamed on T-Mobile and vice versa for LTE), could make it viable to upgrade existing EDGE-only sites to LTE.

Just finished looking through the Framily FrAQ: Roaming is the same 800 minutes / 100 MB that it was on UMW. Sprint isn't "pulling a T-Mobile" here. Mobile Hotspot data appears to be billed separately, with the same $10/1GB plan that UMW had. Sprint's missing an opportunity to one-up T-Mobile here, particularly since when it comes down to it the plan structures are pretty similar (albeit with 500MB more data per line) to Simple Choice. Granted, Framily gives you more data than Simple Choice. But still... Easy Pay doesn't have annual upgrades like One Up, but the implicit plan discount doesn't go away after the device is paid off like it does with One Up. You have to get the unlimited data plan in order to get back One Up's yearly upgrade feature, and it appears as though that feature is the same "give back your phone and you can start a new EasyPay agreement" style that AT&T Next and VZ Edge have. So you turn in your phone once a year and start a new "contract" on the next device you get...which means that the program is still a raw deal if your phone doesn't depreciate by a bit less than half (assuming street price is a little less than SRP on a new device) over the course of a year. As an aside about all this EasyPay bit (didn't T-Mobile have a plan called that a few years ago?), the 16GB Nexus 5 costs about $15 per month, spread over 24 months, if you buy it from Google. And the Moto X is not all that much more expensive. I want to say that this is no mistake on Google's part.

Premium Data died with Unlimited My Way, unless you count non-smartphones and smartphones having different prices for unlimited. But no Premium Data on Framily.

To be fair, Texas has the largest footprint, period, of any state that has Sprint native coverage. So your comment follows naturally Seriously though, there are areas here where you won't get service on Verizon...not even roaming. But Sprint roams in those areas. Or maybe it doesn't, because there's no CDMA set up at all. AT&T is more or less everywhere, though as a voice network I can't stand their AMR-HR codec (Verizon is almost as bad in some areas). It's interesting though that Sprint may not have the fastest network everywhere (though in some areas they do), but they out-cover Verizon because they'll roam where Verizon won't. And their native coverage is pretty solid even without SMR.

I'm not seeing Band 41 quite yet in my neck of the woods. Then again, the Premiere Sponsor only map tells me that that's about par for the course at this point Maybe I'll venture outdoors and see if any other ex-Clear sites are broadcasting TD-LTE now. My phone is configured to latch on when it sees it, as far as I can tell...

So, here are the numbers for Framily vs. Unlimited My Way. I'm assuming One Up gets used on the latter, since that's the easiest comparison. If you get iPhones you come out ahead by $90 over two years by not using One Up, but you could buy an iPhone right now and convert to Framily later, even with the $15 per month surcharge, and gain the same effect. In other cases, phone subsidies are closer to $360 over two years, so you're losing less there. Anyway... One line: $55 for Framily, $55 ($50 + $20 - $15) for UMW, but unlimited data is $10 more expensive on Framily (you can get 3GB for the same price) Two lines: $100 for Framily, $100 for UMW, see above Three lines: $135 for Framily, $135 for UMW...this is starting to sound familiar Four lines: $160 for Framily, $160 for UMW Five lines: $175 for Framily, $185 for UMW; the discount is "trued up" if one line gets unlimited data in both cases Six lines: $180 for Framily, $210 for UMW; prices are equal if three lines get unlimited data in both cases Seven lines: $175 for Framily, $235 for UMW; prices are equal if six lines get unlimited data in both cases 8-10 lines: same marginal price per line, so see above for unlimited plan comparison Now the question is what Sprint means by "upgrades every year" for unlimited-data customers. If you can keep your device at the one year point then it's building a bit of subsidy back into the monthly fee and decreases the real cost of unlimited data over 3GB for gadget hounds like myself. If it's VZ Edge/current One Up style "trade it in", it's less attractive. Though it seems like Easy Pay lets you do that anyway. To condense the comparison above, if you're consuming less than 3GB of data per month, Framily is as good a deal, or better, than UMW with One Up. Or if you can get five or more people on one account...and most of them use less than 3GB of data...you come out even or ahead. Or if you've got six-plus folks on the plan, you can still come out ahead even with a few heavier data users. This is completely ignoring phone payments (I'm assuming everyone buys a Nexus 5 ).

What's interesting is that Virgin Mobile offers a $55 plan with unlimited data, but no roaming. Framily is $55 for 1GB of data, but you also get roaming thrown in. If I didn't know my family's plan usage to be pretty low, Framily would actually work out very much in my favor, assuming my family converted from Ting. Their phones were all bought contract-free, and I'd fall under the "no extra fee limited time promotion" banner (recall that my contract subsidized a Galaxy S III, not the Nexus 5 that I'm currently using). With five family members, I'd be looking at $35/month per line, plus another $10 or $20 for me, depending on the month. Which ends up at $185-$195 per month, which isn't much more than we're paying now, but with a lot more data per line (the only thing I instruct the rest of the family to be thrifty about). For what it's worth, here's the marginal cost of each added Framily line (since the cost reductions as you add lines can get confusing): $55 - one line ($55) $45 - two lines ($50 * 2 - $55) $35 - three lines ($45 * 3 - $50 * 2) $25 - four lines ($40 * 4 - $45 * 3) $15 - five lines ($35 * 5 - $40 * 4) $5 - six lines ($30 * 6 - $35 * 5) -$5 (!) - seven lines ($25 * 7 - $30 * 6) $25 - eight to ten lines Yes, before taxes and fees seven lines are actually cheaper than six! If you have an existing Sprint phone, anyway. For my next post, I'll compare Framily to the current Unlimited My Way plans. By the way, has anyone heard about tethering on Framily? I assume that for 1GB and 3GB plans Sprint doesn't care. But what's the tethering allotment on the unlimited-data plan? Hopefully Sprint matches and raises T-Mobile and says it's 3GB.

Nextel actually fits the old Clear stuff, because a fair chunk of the BRS spectrum used for TD-LTE was actually Nextel's to begin with. And was used in the Research Triangle (here we go again) for Flash-OFDM (Flarion -> Qualcomm -> dead) which at the time was pretty awesome, providing HSPA-class speeds in 2005 or so, back when EvDO rA wasn't out then. If Sprint brands their fixed wireless, starting with the Corpus Christi deployment, as Nextel, that's fine with me. If Sprint can figure out how to make Nextel the "ThinkPad" of wireless like it used to be, they've successfully resurrected the brand. I for one am excited about the speed-limited unlimited hotspot options. 2500MHz with higher-order MIMO and higher-power devices (fixed wireless or hotspots like the Zing) can allow Sprint to sustain such a business model. Thousands of wireless ISPs work with a lot less. I'm not expecting speed limits above 10M for unlimited tiers, and service would probably be only guaranteed while on TD-LTE. But that's enough for the tons of folks who otherwise have one option for uncapped, reasonable-speed broadband: cable. Or none.

Interesting. So in theory my current iPad plan should work just fine. But it's not working with my N5 because that device's MEID + IMEI aren't on VZW's whitelist. Off to eBay I go...

Free never sounded so expensive...

Sounds reasonable. What about the monthly service side of the equation? Anything available for less than the$50 VZW wants for Steal Ever...er...Share Everything?

Yes, different numbers. I don't really care because I spend most of my time with the Sprint SIM in the phone anyway. And most of my communications aren't tied to my phone number.

Seems reasonable enough. I can see T-Mobile, MetroPCS (aka T-Mobile), Sprint and AT&T this way. I need to head down the road a bit and see if my phone will pick up CricKet here. If it does, that's a better indication of whether it'll pick up anyone's LTE that's in Band 4.

I now have two relatively respectable rigs. My main machine is at my place, and an alternate ($600) one is at my parents'. Why multiple desktops? Because it's hard to run one 27" 2560x1440 monitor and two 1080p ones (the brand of the 27" varies, but the smaller ones are always Asus) off a laptop. Anyway... Primary: 2011 iMac 27" Intel Core i7 2600 (not K) 3.4GHz (quad-core) 32GB RAM 256GB Apple SSD (unknown brand) + 2TB Hitachi 7200RPM HDD Radeon 6970M with 2GB VRAM Secondary: iBuyPower NE641FX AMD FX-8320 CPU @ 3.5GHz (8-core) 8GB RAM 1TB WD Blue HDD MSI + nVidia GTX 650 with 1GB VRAM Laptop: mid-2009 MacBook (one of a few laptops, but this one's the most powerful; the others are a Chromebook and an Atom-based convertible tablet) Core 2 Duo 2.13GHz (P7450) 8GB RAM (DDR2-667, moved from a slightly older, otherwise identical machine) Crucial m4 256GB SSD nVidia 9400 All of the above machines dual-boot. The laptop is Win7 + Mac OS. The iMac is Win8 + Mac OS. The iBuyPower is Win8 + Ubuntu 13.10. Nothing extravagant, other than the iMac (which I bought used and upgraded the RAM myself). But all quite functional for what I do, though gaming power varies.

Let's face it: I'm a network nerd. I need to replenish my stock of SIMs since both my T-Mobile and AT&T prepaid SIMs mysteriously disappeared from my wallet (thank goodness neither are on autopay) but there's one annoying omission: VZW. Actually, I have VZW. But it's in a single-band (for LTE anyway) device: a third-gen iPad. And swapping the iPad's SIM into my Nexus 5, which supports everything Verizon has except Band 13, gives me no signal. Given that situation, does anyone have any ideas about getting a device...and service on said device...that supports VZW on AWS, and actually works with it? I'd get the prepaid JetPack service, expensive as it is, but the device being offered with it doesn't have AWS compatibility yet.

Minor correction: VZW will use whoever's backhaul is expedient. Not sure about AT&T. Maybe VZ wireline gives VZW sweetheart deals where the two both have coverage, but VZW generally operates like Sprint does from a backhaul perspective: AAV or ILEC Ethernet to the tower from whoever can make it work, and microwave relays where fiber isn't economical. Except VZW has dark fiber leases for some of its towers.

Correction: SunCom never was part of AT&TWS or Cingular. It was its own thing going back to its TDMA days. But T-Mobile would roam on either SunCom or Cingular in NC back pre-SunCom-purchase. I remember taking an unlocked Cingular Nokia 6010 with a T-Mobile SIM to Fort Caswell (on the coast in NC) and being able to select either network, single T-Mobile didn't exist in the state. But you're right; T-Mobile roaming is the exception rather than the rule.

I tried an iPad SIM in my N5 a bit ago in Austin and didn't get anything. I'll try again later today, but my guess is that I still won't get anything. I didn't even see 3G last time. If I get a chance I'll drop by a VZW store sometime soon and see if AWS LTE has suddenly gone live in this area. But I'm betting that it isn't ehre yet.

Downloading the 4.4.1 update now, since I figure that they won't auto-push it to me because I'm rooted To add to the chorus, I've swapped AT&T (GoPhone), T-Mobile (Wal-Mart 100 minute, 5GB) and Sprint (my main line) SIMs on my N5 with no ill effects. Well, in some cases you have to go into *#*#4636#*#* and switch the phone mode to get service (self-explanatory when you get to that settings page), and you have to reboot when you put a new SIM in, and T-Mobile data-only plans don't work (so I canceled mine). But none of these things are a big deal, and I've successfully used LTE on all three of those carriers on the same phone. The ability to choose a carrier based on what area you're in is great

My X came in today. First impression: wow this is a heavy phone. Second impression: wow that's a nice screen. Third impression: wow, WiFi calling actually works really well 99% of the time (and yes, I did experience the 1%). Haven't tried WiFi to cellular handoff but I have to keep my plan at its current level (WiFi + 4G) until December 13 so I'll have plenty of time to test that. The voice quality on WiFi calling, as long as you don't experience any hiccups (I did for a few seconds in a ~12 minute call), is miles better than the quality of a standard cellular call. That's to be expected, since you're throwing a lot of bandwidth at the problem, but it's nice having a cell phone that will actually hit landline-quality voice to an actual landline. It's a bit of a drag that the only RW phone is single-band, sure, but RW only offers LTE on their top plan anyway, and tri-band support wouldn't exactly encourage WIFi usage, seeing as how the current Spark speed tests rolling in are faster than any connection I can get my hands on in this area.

Just revised the LTE settings on my N5 to match superceleb's. Let's see if I can catch anything.

Has anyone actually picked up B41 LTE on their N5? Scuttlebutt is that the band selection options don't actually do anything yet (according to other threads here).