iansltx

Right. I have a $40 5GB data plan from pre-DC-HSPA+ days (I still have my Huawei Rocket around somewhere). Punch in the epc.tmobile.com APN and I'm good to go on whatever device I choose to use. Including my iPad or aircard. Or a Nexus 4. No voice though, and I think that text messages sent by the device cost a fair chunk of change apiece. Since I want to continue using the SIM directly in the iPad/aircard, I'm not going the $30 route...I don't want a nag screen, and I do want to be able to use the connectivity on a non-phone screen without needing to tether if I don't want to tether.

The $30 plan, last I checked, doesn't include tethering, and probably wouldn't work in my aircard or iPad. Hence why I haven't switched to it already. EDIT: Got a tracking number for my Nexus 4 last night. Nothing has shown up on it quite yet, but I'm guessing it'll be here sometime next week.

It's almost like that one corollary of Moore's Law is taking effect...

As a slight aside, I swapped my T-Mobile data card SIM for a microSIM on Monday, allowing me to use T-Mobile service with my third-gen VZW iPad, which has no AWS support of any kind. Here in Austin, it appears as though T-Mobile has a single HSPA+ carrier in PCS, but almost no one is using it, so I've been able to hit 12-14 Mbps down, 3.5 Mbps up...the upload speed is better than I've ever seen on either T-Mobile or AT&T HSPA+ in their default bands, DC-HSPA+ included. A Nexus 4 (8GB) will be coming in the mail a week or two from now, so in addition to checking out PCS HSPA+ deployments I'll be one of the first to know when my area gets AWS LTE with T-Mo. Lest I be mistaken for a T-Mobile fanboy after the above, my T-Mobile bill is around $44 (5GB of data). That's higher than my Verizon bill but lower than my Sprint bill. Primarily because,I don't like 40 kbps speeds in an area that I spend 10%+ of my time.

On the other side of the Net Neutrality spectrum, I believer French provider Free actually builds femtos into their IPTV boxes/routers now. Definitely possible, though what Google would want would probably be a single-band (BRS/EBS) LTE-A base station more than anything else. Maybe Sprint would let Google use the spectrum for their own purposes for free in areas that Google has GFiber and femtos backhauling most traffic.

In some cases, yes. However working on a tight budget doesn't necessarily mean that they've got poor speeds due to backhaul issues. CricKet (and T-Mobile, for that matter) dumps its wireless data traffic more or less directly onto the Internet, rather than routing it through an internal network. Since they aren't a wireline company at all, that's the cheaper way of doing things, and has generally allowed them lower latency than, say, Sprint or AT&T. In the same vein, CricKet probably has a lot of both wireless and AAV backhaul in many areas now, since it's cheaper than T1s or ILEC fiber. T-Mobile is similar, but with a lot more fiber to the tower. Going back to history for a bit, remember that the B side CLR block got handed to the ILEC in most areas, while the A side block got given to a non-ILEC company. Hence the situation in NYC. Or, in the example of the CMA north of San Antonio, Cellular One-Concho Wireless got the A side, while Five Star Wireless (RSA 15b2) got the B side. Five Star was at one point a cooperative effort between three or four local telephone companies/cooperatives in the area. As time went on, ownership of Five Star shifted to where it is now: a subsidiary of a telephone cooperative whose primary customer base is around San Angelo. The B band has as a result seen analog, TDMA, CDMA 1x, GSM and now HSPA+ deployed on it. CellOne-Concho for the longest time operated a primarily analog network on the CLR A side. They had TDMA, but only in limited areas. They had GSM, but it was only for roamers (aka Cingular). Finally (around 2005 I think) the company was bought by CellOne-Dobson, who finished GSM upgrades and started selling GSM phones in the area. Then AT&T purchased Dobson. According to my records, AT&T finally launched HSPA in Fredericksburg (on CLR A) on 9/30/09. Since West Central Wireless still owns CLR-B, there's no EvDO at all in CLR in that four-county area (Gillespie, Kerr, Kendall, Kimble). And it was only recently that WCW got 3G in the area. Verizon owns a number of towers, all of which have EvDO in PCS, so they cover the area rather well. But I digress...

Yep. Though having enough voice capacity on CricKet is a relatively (five years) recent phenomenon in some areas; from what I hear "circuits busy" still happened at times despite CDMA 1x being a high capacity voice-only tech. I'm also pretty sure that, at least in San Antonio, the Pocket buyout helped CricKet's service quality in the area immensely. Good old Nortel 1x gear for Pocket's entire network...same as Sprint in that area. For the time that I had Pocket, if I could get a decent signal, voice quality was one thing that I could never complain about.

A word on CricKet's history in Texas: In 2006, a paging magnate used old AT&T Wireless spectrum (PCS) and Nortel 1x equipment to start a new unlimited carrier in San Antonio: Pocket Communications. Service was actually better than CricKet in San Antonio and northward, at least as far as pure voice coverage went (remember, 1x only for data). I had their service for a few months during this period, spread over three different phones (Kyocera K132 or something...the blue soft-touch flip phone, Audiovox 8910, Motorola v323i), but ended up switching to Virgin Mobile because I didn't need unlimited voice and wanted better coverage. Anyway, for awhile, Pocket did quite well for itself in terms of customer numbers and service provided (in a voice-centric world); I think it ended up with 400,000 customers when it was absorbed by CricKet, with San Antonio being the only big metro that it covered (in addition to Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley, all using 5x5 or so of PCS spectrum). For all of its existence, it attacked CricKet head-on, causing that company to offer more services at a lower price in the San Antonio market (and others where they competed with Pocket) than they did anywhere else. At one point, you could get unlimited local, long distance, text and picture messaging for $25 per month, with $40 per month netting you unlimited everything (plus a roaming allotment if I remember correctly)...well before cheap non-smartphone unlimited plans had made their way out of the likes of CricKet and onto the "big four" stage. In late 2010, CricKet merged Pocket's Texas assets into its own, in return for a 24% stake in the combined company. The buyout gave CricKet PCS spectrum in South Texas markets where only AWS was available to them before, and removed a particularly troublesome competitor in the area, even though CricKet at the time had started deploying EvDO and Pocket was stuck at 1x (remember, Pocket had very little spectrum to work with). Plan prices went up on CricKet relatively shortly thereafter, but the company has gotten better coverage in Pocket's former service area as a result of the buyout. As an aside, I think that Austin (not part of Pocket's service area) has had CricKet service for quite awhile, and the relative lack of urban canyons here means that deploying a coverage-focused network in PCS will simultaneously give you enough capacity for a fair number of users and relatively efficient coverage of a large area. Use less-expensive equipment (e.g. waiting until late 2012 to deploy LTE) and you don't have huge costs to recoup. Same with phones, since CricKet's largest phone subsidy is around $50 (guesstimate, but I think I'm in the right league). So you can stay in the game with a small percentage of a relatively large metro-area market...though you might still lose money nationwide.

Oh, hi guys... I actually bought an Optimus Regard (MetroPCS calls it the LG Motion 4G) on CricKet around Thanksgiving, and had a chance to test out service in both San Antonio and Austin shortly after both LTE networks went live for CricKet. Thanks to the fact that practically no one was on the network yet (the Galaxy SIII hadn't come out for CricKet yet), I was able to pull 6-7 Mbps in both directions with the phone. I believe latency was in the high thirties to mid forties to Dallas. The lowish speeds are due to CricKet not having much spectrum in Austin (or much of anywhere, really); they were either using 1.4 MHz or 3 MHz LTE carriers at the time, as far as I can guess. I put the phone into LTE only mode (*#*4636#*# works) and noticed that CricKet's LTE fades out about where it says on its map: not far west of MoPac in NW Austin. Go east of MoPac and everything runs at LTE speeds (CricKet does seem to have coverage of Austin down pretty well) but you're dropping down to 1-2 Mbps EvDO if you get too far west. I wasn't the one testing service in San Antonio so I can't speak to coverage there, though speeds were comparable. Honestly, at this point their network in both San Antonio and Austin (and maybe Houston?) is more consistent than Sprint's...if you're in a "covered" area you consistently get LTE, though if you step out of that area you're dropping back to EvDO quickly. Fortunately, on CricKet towers they appear to have upgraded backhaul a bit recently, such that in Fredericksburg I was able to pull a couple Mbps with latency below 100ms...though that latency part has been that way for years (CricKet dumps onto the Internet a lot more quickly than Sprint does backbone-wise).