iansltx

Sounds like CenturyTel folks were in charge. They were rural-only forever, with little to no competition, so they could afford to skimp out on network-building without losing too many customers. Competing against the Comcasts and Time Warner Cables of the world does not afford them this luxury. Honestly, I'm not sure who SprintLink would be a good fit for. Level3 and CenturyLink are already plenty big. Other providers might not be willing to pay a premium that Sprint would want for their network. Zayo is already flush with AboveNet; I wouldn't expect them to make any huge purchases in the near future. Maybe tw telecom though. I would say Cogent, but they would want a price that's single percentage points of what the network is worth. All of that said, if Sprint decides to go all-in with NV and beyond, having zero bandwidth costs at the backbone level makes life easier for them than, say, T-Mobile.

HomeFusion seems like the more reliable product though. Bigger antenna. And no home phone requirement (which uses a separate box, over CDMA, if you do pick it up). That said, I don't mind at all that AT&T is doing this. Sure, its prices are downright bad when you compare to terrestrial access. But HSPA+ or LTE beats satellite, which is priced similarly these days, as long as it's available, and now you get to choose between both wireless Ma Bell incarnations. And this puts a bit of pressure on Sprint and T-Mobile to do the same. Which Sprint can do by grabbing off-the-shelf dual-pol 2.4GHz antennas and hooking them to TD-LTE WiFi routers, and putting the requisite equipment on their towers. Plenty of capacity compared to VZ and T, so they can hit a lower price point. They've done this already with Clearwire WiMAX; I'm almost certain it'll happen again.

A Viaero partnership with T-Mobile would definitely be a nice foil against AT&T acquisition. Sell the Omaha network, lease all AWS spectrum in the area, and get Viaero to build out AWS LTE there, harmonizing their network with T-Mobile's. Get a reciprocal roaming agreement going, and T-Mobile suddenly actually has coverage in a lot of places where it's blank now...and Viaero can now data-roam. So many wins there. As for Long Lines, they've got a GSM network. 'twas bound to happen. Cell29 doesn't have much of a network anyway, so not a good Sprint acq target. Re: Alltel roaming, I'm currently in Harrison, AR. Sprint has a site or two here, but most coverage is provided by Verizon roaming, ex-Alltel, SID 208. As with other legacy Alltel markets, EvDO roaming still works here,and it's pretty zippy thanks to the LTE overlay that covers much of the area (though there are still pockets of 3G-only for VZW).

What's Telia's sub count vs. Verizon's? The iPhone's spectrum support is not a level playing field. US operators get things handed to them (BC10 CDMA being one of them, LTE PCS+G being another) that other operators don't get.

Was at East Texas Regional Airport the last two nights. No 4G yet there, nor did I expect any, and data was nonexistent due to the large quantity of people there for the Great Texas Balloon Festival the second night...but voice and SMS worked perfectly. And at times data was 600-700 kbps in each direction, so nothing to complain about.

A few notes here: 1. Sprint's subscriber base isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe when T-Mobile actually starts serving areas with below-suburb population densities with WCDMA...heck, even with EDGE. But they refuse to do that. There's consolidation in the urban market (Leap, MetroPCS) because even at high densities there are only so many ways you can split that pie. 2. Once you have high quality wireline back haul to a site, the cost of additional bandwidth is marginal. I'm sure the interfaces to Sprint equipment...on both aides of the link...can do gigabit, and Sprint's AAV vendors will give them a decent deal because the cost for them is marginal as well...and Sprint has plenty of scale. Now if we're talking about wireless fed sites there may be issues, particularly on longer spurs. But I would just expect those sites to be last on the list for TD upgrades. That, or if they need TD they will get fiber or short range, high cap wireless backhaul. So, while I'm not sure how quickly Sprint will start expanding the fringes of their network to deal with an increasingly hostile roaming environment (1x on VZW, 95 percent of the time), they will have money to get that done in the $16B, even after NV2.0, I think. Though I wouldn't expect more than about 500 new sites to come of the first wave of expansion. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

Doubt it. 20MHz TD is the first rev, which will get real-world speeds up to about what you see in T-Mobile's 10x10 markets (like Dallas is now...25 Mbps up on a phone is impressive, though TD 20 MHz won't make it quite that high). I'd expect Nx20MHz to happen as WiMAX is turned down. So give it 18 months. T-Mo might have 20x20 FD online in some markets by then, but not all.

One interesting thing that I noticed, not NV/LTE related, was that Sprint still has an extensive roaming agreement with SID 1892 (West Central Wireless fka Five Star Wireless) for 1x. Data pretty much doesn't work on their network (probably because there's a single 1x carrier with no EvDO...WCW has gone the GSM + HSPA+ route), but voice + SMS are fine. I still had a dead zone or two even with roaming, but the dead zones were more pronounced on my Verizon iPad, which didn't roam onto WCW. One point against my suspicion that WCW only has one 1x carrier live at any given location is the appearance of 1x in PCS (channel 925 or something...should have taken a screenshot) in Brady. Or maybe it was Eden. Either way, WCW only has band 0 spectrum in Fredericksburg so it was something different. I couldn't connect to AT&T's network with my data-only-plan Nexus 4 during the trip, but it looked like both they and WCW had consistent service up the corridor San Angelo on GSM + WCDMA (or at least GSM). I would've looked into it further, but my WCW microSIM is probably dead at this point because I only paid for a month of service a few months ago. In any event, that stretch of road is ideal for a NV SMR 1x deployment. LTE would be nice as well, but it wouldn't take too many sites to get the area covered, as long as you use the right (existing) towers.

Rode through San Angelo yesterday and had 4G for a bit, though Verizon LTE went out further from town (got ~50/10 at the end of a microwave daisy-chain at the Eden rest stop). Big Spring of course doesn't have anything yet, and as such data speeds are pretty slow there (T-Mobile has H+ and VZ has LTE though). My trip didn't take me west of Big Spring so San Angelo was the only West Texas market where I saw LTE (the next time I picked it up was a bit west of Fort Worth).

My TWC has been okay, delivering 50/5 most of the time, but I'm paying plenty for the service ('net only, modem no longer rented) and YouTube connectivity is horrid. I'd be happy if they upped upload speeds to 10 Mbps and fixed the YouTube issue (which is their problem). But they'd have to make upgrades, which cost money, to do that...and neither U-Verse's 45 Mbps upgrade nor Google Fiber are here yet. And LTE, though faster on uploads, would be a bad idea to try to use as a home connection. Until FreedomPop offers TD-LTE based service anyway.

Take this as anecdotal, but a friend who has the Franklin U770 (so PCS-only LTE) got a big LTE performance boost (also in a fringe area) by connecting the 3G antenna port (weird, I know) to his old WISP antenna, a 24 dbi grid at 2.4 GHz (1.9 and 2.4 are close enough that the loss in gain isn't too big...and of course 2.5/2.6 is right there...though we're talking about a single-pol antenna). It could just be that turning off the 3G antenna on-device helped throughput, and plugging in the single-pol antenna to one of the 4G antenna ports resulted in a device that wouldn't boot (temporary issue) but 2.4 GHz antennas are cheap and could provide a nice boost to folks who are in marginal areas right now. I think antennas of that caliber are already being used by some people with the Clear WiMAX desktop modems (with the appropriate adapter), so maybe this is a little more than anecdotal

Add my vote in favor of the Victory. I know three people (two immediate family members) who have them and they're solid phones. Nothing amazing, but solid nonetheless. Head and shoulders better than the Viper. And the S III battery and its battery are interchangeable (found this out last night). The new LG Optimus F3 might work as well, but I don't have any experience with that phone.

Yep. But 10+ Mbps of upload capacity on 5 MHz, which can scale linearly to 10MHz and 20MHz, is nearly double what you can get on H+. And 35-37 Mbps real-world capacity for small cell sizes is a big boost from 21 Mbps...which ends up being around 14-16 Mbps in real life...in the same spectrum allotment. The difference between T-Mobile and any other large carrier in the US is that, to deploy LTE, they have to refarm existing, not-all-that-much-less-efficient, spectrum from the get-go. Sprint is starting on the (vacant) G block, Verizon on the (vacant) 700 band, followed by the (vacant for them) AWS band. AT&T? Same thing, but with a different 700 band. But for T-Mobile, adding 37 Mbps of LTE capacity means, in many cases, removing 21 Mbps of H+. And equipment on both sides of the link is less expensive on H+ than LTE, though now the gap has closed enough that TMo doesn't mind making the jump. Particularly if it means that their early adopter users, with an ARPU of $80+ including EIP, have a network to themselves that they can rant and rave about.

'cuz that's not how Poser Mo...T-Mobile...rolls. Also, you have to haul microwave from somewhere that's fiber-connected. If you don't have line of sight to a fiber-powered tower a few miles away then you're back at square one. Sprint is willing to do microwave backhaul. But MW BH is one reason why some Sprint TD-LTE (can barely contain my excitement) sites in DEN are running at 8 Mbps rather than 40.

Hmm...so only two transmit paths for the entire device (WiFi + Cellular)? That's unfortunate...coming from the owner of an SVDO + SVLTE device.

Or whatever the LS980 is. I'll be picking one up when it comes out, if Samsung doesn't beat LG to the punch.

Takes more effort to string/provision fiber to a rural cell site than to move an urban site from 5x5 to 20x20, if you own the spectrum to do it.

Still, those are some phenomenal speeds. Right near what you'd expect for the theoretical max for FD 10x10. But that's what happens when you're effectively on a small cell, using a tech that's closer to WiFi than a traditional WWAN. That said, I'm sure that that will slow down under load, and Sprint will be able to pass that with 2*20 TD-LTE

I'm impressed with the initial TD-LTE rollout in Denver. Sounds like Sprint is matching other carriers' 10x10 FD-LTE performance, and this is just the beginning. Though having a honkin' hotspot vs. a phone probably helps a lot. When I was in Denver my Epic's WiMAX wasn't the most solid thing out there. But TD-LTE seems to be turning out the same kinds of speeds that I was seeing earlier this month on my Nexus 4 running on T-Mobile 10x10 LTE. FWIW, if you've got dual antennas for it you can run 130 Mbps in 802.11n in 2.4GHz in 20MHz channels. MCS15. Which, even in the bad RF environment that is my apartment complex, churns out a pretty reliable 50 Mbps for me (then again, I'm connecting to an Amped Wireless R10000G, which is a more expensive router with high-end RF components). I wouldn't be surprised if the Netgear (fka Sierra) hotspot only has single-chain WiFi on board, though it'd be somewhat of a disconnect as the LTE side is certainly using two Rx antennas. I won't have time to do it this/next week, but when I'm back from a trip that will hit West Texas, Dallas, East Texas and Arkansas markets I'll drop by the Sprint store near me in Austin, which has WiMAX very nearby with plenty of backhaul. That site is a good candidate for TD-LTE, as are many here, though Sprint's blanket of PCS G LTE may mean that Band 41 is a lower priority here.