iansltx

Re: Sprint in 900, not gonna happen. That band doesn't work for wideband (anything beyond XX KHz) communications, which is what you'd want in this case. Besides, folks other than the public at large own those channels. Public safety, Sprint, or whoever. You might be able to tune existing 900MHz equipment to send/receive on those frequencies, but then you'd be breaking the law.

Hate to let everyone down on this thread, but those spectrum licenses are for "Light licensed" 3.65GHz. I forget the name of the WiMAX provider that used this spectrum and then went belly-up, taking a lot of BTOP or equivalent funding with them. Was a few years ago. The spectrum itself isn't bad, but there isn't much of it, it's effectively fixed-only (speaking from indirect experience from a telephone co-op that deployed in the band) and you don't have it all to yourself. A license costs under $200 for 10 years nationwide, though you can't operate in 3.65 "Exclusion Zones" around a number of large cities. Unlicensed 900MHz. This one's a minefield, because the majority of smart meters run in this band. As do a number of existing wireless service providers (WISPs). And, again, not much spectrum there. Can you run an actual mobile network on either band? All signs point to no...the closest thing you can do is something like Clearwire's desktop modem: a relatively high-powered, self-installed device. Am I saying that this is all a bad idea? Well, no...it's being done to some extent by a ton of WISPs out there. Heck, if I wasn't so busy writing software I'd execute on what's been a dream of mine since high school. But it's no panacea. Unless I'm missing some secret sauce that William knows and I don't (like hardware that's nearly as cost-effective as Ubiquiti gear but much more performant...or almost as performant and in a much smaller form factor). Oh, and you aren't going to find LTE in either of those bands. The LTE airlink is way too fragile to perform well with any level of interference that can't be managed tightly (aka you must have full-on licensed spectrum). For what it's worth, if you could convince Globalstar to let you rent TLPS from them, you could run TD-LTE on that. But none of us here have the money to do that for more than a few days. Lastly, if you're doing fixed wireless, 5.x GHz or MV-DDS spectrum (~12GHz) is preferable to lower bands, due to the capacity available. MV-DDS is actually available in a few (rural) areas on reasonable licensing terms, though most of it is owned by...you guessed it...Dish. 5.x is the same spectrum that 802.11ac routers ramp up on, so it'll get more cluttered as time goes on. But it'll still be usable for high-bandwidth PtMP fixed wireless for awhile yet, and you can actually compete with the lower end of cable on a speed basis. And it's a heck of a lot cheaper to deploy than LTE (the equipment as well as the licenses) or fiber.

I'm sure many of us (myself included) wished that Sprint had merged with Alltel. But that ship has sailed, and eventually Sprint will have to figure out what to do once EvDO roaming agreements with Alltel (in ex-Alltel coverage areas) fall through. Also, remember that Nextel was the owner of a fair chunk of BRS spectrum back pre-merger (AJ, correct me if I'm wrong on this). That's what they used to conduct Flarion's Flash-OFDM trials in the Research Triangle. I remember reading in PC Mag circa 2005 about those trials...they were hitting speeds comparable to HSPA 3.6 when AT&T was just deploying UMTS in a few markets...and both Verizon and Sprint were still on EvDO rev 0. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1770838,00.asp

The US isn't WInPhone's own market. The Lumia 520/521 has actually done quite well for Nokia/MS in other markets, where people are more price-conscious (the phone is $100-$150 unsubsidized). In Mexico, WinPhone is actually above iOS and RIM in sales (behind Android of course). Would I have liked to see a Lumia running Android? Sure. But Nokia's phones are high-end enough that people will put up with WinPhone due to hardware quality...and then find out that WinPhone isn't all that bad (it isn't my first choice, but really it isn't all that bad). Let's face it: non-Nokia WinPhone devices haven't been anything to write home about. But the Lumias are very solid, and you've got the 520 on one end and the 1020 at the other...and that's what's keeping WinPhone from being an absolute footnote in history at this point. As a web dev, I'm not a huge fan of having more devices running with IE to deal with. But the WinPhone 8 IE version is actually pretty good at rendering pages (as opposed to the atrocity that shipped with WinPhone 7), and I'll take it over older iOS browsers or Android 2.3, which is what you're getting at the Lumia 520 price point elsewhere.

Ting phones are Sprint phones. I'm sure Sensorly would lump them in together. Side note: the rest of my family have converted to Galaxy Victories, except my non-smartphone-toting dad, and they seem to be happy with the quality of service they're getting

I'm going with daisy-chained microwave backhaul on those towers. Which doesn't actually impact speeds that much, or latency. That's how VZW is serving up LTE south of San Angelo, TX, and I'm sure they're using it in other areas. Does capacity take a hit this way? Sure. But when fiber to these sites is nonexistent you gotta do what you gotta do. My guess is that one immediate ramification of this deal is that FiOS builds will pretty much stop, even more so than they already are doing. Now that Verizon can take 100% of profits generated by VZW, they'll try to sink all of their money there. They'll also have a bit more incentive to invest in their network. So AWS might come online sooner in some areas. Which would be nice in places where LTE 750 site density (which is increasing in urban areas, even after the initial build-out) just isn't enough.

Check out reboot.fcc.gov. 1710-1755 is the AWS band on the upstream side, but I forget what the DS side is.

Hmm, I wonder if that router supports IPv6. My current Amped does not. Getting back on-topic, I may pick up the SA next month. Not completely sure what I'm expecting I'll find, as I'll have a tri-band Sprint LTE device at some point. But maybe I'll be able to see when AT&T or VZW turn on LTE in AWS around here. EDIT: Looks like it does. But I may opt for an AC1950 router instead, since I'm covering such a small area.

Circuitous fiber routes particularly plague transit. If you've got dark fiber then you've got less issues. But lit stuff? They could be muxing eight ways from Sunday and providing poor performance to match.

How about 1500 being LTE, 2000 being TD-LTE and 2500 being LTE-Advanced? That makes more sense IMO. Otherwise you end up with frequency bands and other confusing stuff. Also, We should rename "smoke signals" to iDEN

Ahem...Millenicom. Not unlimited, but my boss now has two 2.4GHz grid antennas (one H-pol, one V-pol) hooked to his Franklin U720 modem. Thanks to the (tons of) extra gain, he told me today that he was pulling 15/5 or so in an area that normally barely gets cell service. Yes, it's a rather expensive setup (equipment plus $70/mo) but it beats Clear WiMAX any day of the week. And the antennas will work perfectly well when he swaps out his current data stick for a tri-band one, which will happen once I see TD off of the site he's hitting...five miles away. I don't think Sprint will actively advertise Millenicom-like service in the near future (or even something similar to HomeFusion from Verizon). But my guess is that the carrier is perfectly fine with MCom's user base: high usage folks with powerful modems in rural areas who are likely to actively work to get the best signal they possibly can, without whining to Sprint if they can't. With TD-LTE, Sprint cares even less about these folks because they'll just sit on a single 20MHz TD carrier, use a bit of bandwidth, and do that bandwidth usage from a device that pulls down (and pushes back) the signal loud and clear. In my boss's situation, the antennas we're talking about have 24 dBi of gain in 2.4 GHz...each. Of course you can't just add the gains together, but when you add in a rather large amount of spatial diversity we're talking about, you've got a nearly absurd amount of gain compared to your standard hotspot. As such, I wouldn't be surprised if he saw speeds comparable to my cable connection, at least right when the service went live (that city has never seen anything going on in BRS/EBS).

Depending on how far you are from the tower, atmospheric changes at night could be doing funky things to the signal. But I don't think I've ever seen Sprint stop powering a site at night...and there are some pretty rural sites out here.

Nokia is doing well enough I think that a takeover by Huawei won't happen.

I've used Sprint's daily proration of data (vs. by GBs) to my advantage a few times, mainly relating to for-pay tethering. I don't tend to need tethering, but when I do it's for a few days and a few GB of data. So I'll turn on the 6GB plan, do what I need to do, then turn it off a few days later. Is Sprint leaving money on the table by billing this way? Yep. But I figure that the combination of me giving them plenty of direct and indirect business, plus the fact that my tethering usage is on a lightly loaded tower (albeit one that uses wireless backhaul) equals things out a bit.

Makes sense. So either out-of-band access or emergency stuff. Peplink, MTik or something else? Sounds like your solution is slightly more elegant than mine: have a device on each carrier and pick the one with decent service at the time You could probably just buy this, turn off the WiFi and USB-tether it to your router. A little less elegant but it'd get the job done.

I'll have to ask; looks like he teaches mainly grad-level stuff, but I'll ask my former Geo grad student friend about him.

At that point, you might as well buy one from Sprint at full price, then activate it on Millenicom. Even $6 per GB gets expensive when you're trying to use the connection as a wireline replacement.

Last name? If I don't know him, I'm sure a friend or two of mine would.