iansltx

Re: Airtran 757s, they don't exist. You may be thinking of North American Airways, which has a similar color scheme and flies 757s on charters. Re: the US/AA merger, I'm looking forward to it. Any excuse to get old, worn-out M80s out of the sky. To be fair, the planes could fly for another ten years...Delta maintains their MD-88 fleet quite well and I had no issue flying one DEN-MSP last year...but American doesn't spend enough money on 'em to make you feel like you aren't flying a rustbucket. Maybe I'm biased, but for good reason. The last two flights I've had on AA have gone wrong in some manner. The most recent one was delayed an hour...and everyone had to stay on the plane...on a 35 minute or so flight (DFW-AUS). The one-way before that, my force-checked bag (force-checked as I was entering the jetway in Orlando, no less!) got stuck in Miami, a four-hour flight from Denver. My bag showed up around 3am the next morning at my doorstep. AA fixed the problem in that case, though I didn't get my checked bag fee back. For all of their IT woes, I wouldn't mind flying United again (I've flown them three or so times, not counting old Continental flights). Though the vast majority of my travel has been on Frontier or Southwest, with a little Delta (good experience, despite the congested mess that is ATL) and US Airways (good experience0 thrown in, in addition to American. Virgin America will be flying out of Austin soon, but I probably won't need to go to the Bay Area any time soon, so I won't be able to mess with all the tech on their planes.

Worst idea ever. VX is bleeding money like no tomorrow. No one's gonna buy them, much less a cell phone company.

ub-1GHz has interference issues though, the the spectrum is quite expensive if you're just going to use it as an overlay for a much denser network in an urban context. It would be less expensive for T-Mobile to split cells to get in-building coverage (which honestly isn't that bad from what I've seen...areas where it's poor are an artifact of poor site placement since Sprint has fine indoor coverage there) than for them to purchase 600 spectrum covering heavily populated areas to do the same thing. I could be wrong, but there's a reason that MetroPCS for the most part stayed out of the 700 auction.

For peak speeds in markets that can hold a 10x10 or better LTE carrier in AWS, yes. For average speeds in markets that can hold a 20x20 LTE carrier in AWS, yes. In markets like Kansas City where AWS LTE will be 5x5 for awhile yet, no.

Yes...though keep in mind that by the time 600MHz rolls around I'm sure that there will be both CDMA and GSM based carriers grabbing that spectrum, for FD-LTE. T-Mobile (or whoever else) can do LTE-only roaming with any of them, provided compatibility exists. My original point still stands: T-Mobile only wants to make sure that they can ink a roaming agreement with whomever they please. From what I've seen, they don't want to serve rural areas themselves if they can help it.

The voice quality difference is because AT&T pretty much always uses AMR-HR (half rate) as its voice codec now. T-Mobile uses AMR-FR (full rate). In this case, throwing more bits at the problem really does help. And of course AMR-WB increases the quality gulf further, but I can't test that, since my N4 doesn't have a voice plan attached (though if it did I have a friend with a One S who I could call to test the service out). The odd result of AT&T's AMR-HR preference in areas that aren't out in the sticks is that folks in the middle of nowhere (where AT&T is probably still running GSM only, or maybe a single HSPA+ carrier in CLR) can get decent voice quality on Big Blue. That, or my dad's LG flip phone (AT&T via Tracfone...give it a week and it'll be Sprint via Ting) was roaming when he received that call yesterday.

If you're an urban-only carrier, you don't care about low spectrum for your own purposes. You do, however, care about low spectrum availability for your roaming partners. Let them build a microwave-fed network with cell radii of five miles on 600MHz, then ink a roaming agreement with them so their subs use you in the city and your subs use them in the country. Win-win.

I'll probably get this, since by the time it comes out it'll actually work where I need it to. The only reason why I don't have a WiMAX device from FreedomPop is...well...everywhere I can get WiMAX I don't need it.

You want your catchphrase back? Not gonna happen.

Not gonna happen. Softbank wants to create an economy of scale around LTE-2600 and needs Clearwire to do that.

Not really. Two years from now, both companies will have solid LTE footprints...Sprint will have its footprint completely upgraded...and at that point all you'd need to do is add a single band (AWS) to Sprint phones to lock onto T-Mobile's (faster where spectrum is available) LTE network. I wouldn't mind a S/T-Mo merger in the slightest, either. Though my ulterior motives involve higher LTE speeds on Sprint (10x10 or 20x20 LTE carriers in AWS) and a second or third WCDMA option in a lot of GSM-only areas. ...and, of course, more PCS spectrum would allow Sprint to deploy 10x10 LTE everywhere. Maybe even 20x20 in some cases. Now that'd be cool, even though I'd need a new phone to support it.