iansltx

If Sprint never bought Nextel to receive BRS spectrum, do you think Sprint would have ever partnered up with Clearwire?

Can't speculate, since I'm not sure whether Sprint had a buildout requirement for its BRS spectrum.

Necropost, coming up!

IMO Sprint + Alltel would've been better than Sprint + Nextel.

Yes, Sprint got a 10MHz nationwide block of near-PCS, plus 14MHz of near-nationwide SMR, plus a big block of BRS spectrum (still waiting to see how that stuff gets used...135 million folks covered by a network that will never expand is pitiful for a national carrier).

However with Alltel Sprint would have gotten 25MHz of cellular in many areas, some PCS in others, and a customer base that could be very, very easily integrated into their own. Sprint would also have the upper hand on the roaming front (remember, Alltel and Sprint had a reciprocal roaming agreement...including 3G data...when Alltel was independent...Verizon has to keep the agreement up for another few years), since they would have service (via ex-Alltel) where other companies (even Verizon) didn't. Oh, and 12-plus-million customers, none of whom would whine when transitioned to Sprint's network (not that they'd notice the difference, since both networks roamed on each other).

And when the time to go 4G came around, Sprint could just deploy on CLR and PCS...no SMR funny business (though their economies of scale mean that SMR LTE phones will exist anyway), adding (and then widening) LTE carriers as they retired CDMA (it's easy to fit a 5x5 LTE carrier into 25MHz in the A or B cellular band).

I fully expected Sprint to buy Alltel, back even before the private equity buyout (and I wasn't following the news closely). I was sad when Verizon locked it down...they killed Alltel's unlimited EvDO data cards (yes, they existed, and people used them for home broadband connections when nothing else was available) pretty darned quickly.

Even after not having a QWERTY for almost two years(HTC Mogul), I still believe that physical keyboards provide a better, more accurate typing experience. From using the likes of Swiftkey, Swype, and the Windows Phone on-screen keyboard, typing with accuracy(and not just auto-correcting) is something that I only achieve on a HW keyboard.

I'm with you on that...then again, I've used the Mogul, the Touch Pro and the OG Epic...so the SIII will be a radical departure for me (one reason I returned the OG Evo was the lack of a keyboard).

4ktvs, what modem do you have? Maybe get TWC to swap that...if they haven't already...

One of the 27 2nd Round makets. When it come wireless I have a crap load to pick form all with 4G of some kind, but only TWC for home ISP.

Gonna take a wild guess here: RDU area?

Is CenturyLink or AT&T the telephone company there (I had family in Hillsborough, where Sprint->Embarq->CenturyLink was the provider)? Are you out of range of their DSL service?

Keep in mind that, while AT&T DSL has a cap of 150GB (or more), trying to push that much data over anyone's cellular network (including, unfortunately, Clearwire's) is generally a bad idea.

One of the 27 2nd Round makets. When it come wireless I have a crap load to pick form all with 4G of some kind, but only TWC for home ISP.

Sad day.

Might be worthwhile to grab a Twitter account, contact TWC on there (I know other ISPs, e.g. Comcast, CenturyLink, Suddenlink, have Twitter accounts for this purpose) and see if they can give you some better support. Dropping them a Smokeping graph (dslreports.com -> Tools) might help your case.

At any rate, since Sprint doesn't have a whole lot in the way of spectrum for their first LTE deployments, they won't likely offer unlimited aircard service for awhile, if ever. To give you an idea of their network's capacity, it's about the same as a *single* channel on TWC's cable modem service. In most places, Time Warner has four or more of those channels, serving an area significantly smaller than what a Sprint cell tower would serve, which is why they can generally offer decent, unlimited service over their network.

And roaming on Verizon's holdings, correct?

Yes. At the very least ex-Alltel ones. In areas where Verizon has 850MHz CDMA, DC should have excellent coverage, above and beyond what Sprint has on its own.

blkmiles, who's your ISP?

I have a 50M down, 15M up (neither of which are typos) Comcast connection (also not a typo; they ofer decent upload speeds here...for a price). I've pushed hundreds of GBs through the connection in a month (well over their former 250GB cap) and, since I'm paying plenty for my connection I suppose, I haven't been accosted by them asking me to slow down. Of course, it helps that the vast, vast majority of that traffic isn't used to shuttle questionable files around via BitTorrent.

All that said, I'm a power user. My parents could probably get by on 20GB per month, as long as I'm not in the house. And, for that demographic, they're heavy Internet users (Netflix a few times per month, YouTube, e-mail, other online video, etc.).

But I digress. Complaining to TWC and getting them to give you a solid connection would be more solid/productive than getting home Internet from Clear unless you're in one of their markets that provides good service. Getting a 'net connection from Sprint (Milleniocom, $70, unlimited 3G) would likely be much slower than your TWC.

Highly ironic.

To be completely fair, Verizon *does* provide a good deal if you can get Share Everything with absolutely zero data, with non-smartphones. Boom, unlimited talk and text for $30 per line. But I'm pretty sure that's not how it works; the minimum price for two smartphones (including some data) is $130 per month. That's $20 cheaper than Sprint's cheapest family plan, but for that $20 you lose unlimited voice (I personally don't care, because Any Mobile covers 90+% of my daytime calling) and gain unlimited data on each line. If you're matching prices, you can get 4GB spread over two lines...still advantage Sprint unless you call landlines a lot (who does nowadays?).

No kidding.

My iPad will stay on Verizon, with a $0-$50 monthly fee for data depending on how much I need LTE for that month (will probably be $20 for 1GB most of the time). My phone is staying Sprint. I had thought about switching to VZW if their shared data plans were reasonable (e.g. $15 or so more per month to add the iPad to a standard individual voice line). I'd only be paying marginally more under the new plan, and would get unlimited voice minutes in return, but I don't need unlimited voice minutes, and my gut feeling says that I'll never actually be on the correct plan data-wise.

If Verizon wanted to encourage people to use data on their plans, they'd make the tiers cheaper, with a higher top end (e.g. 20GB instead of 10GB). As it is, they just want to wring more out of the customer for similar services. Too bad it will keep folks like me, who know that they have the best wireless network in the US for the moment, away.

Are those plans also supplanting the individual-line ones? Because that data is freakishly expensive.

At that rate, if I'm a single user, I'd go to Page Plus Cellular, get unlimited talk, text and 2GB of data for $55, and buy my phone outright.

If my entire family switched to VZW, we would probably need 4GB, maybe 6GB of data, spread over three smartphones and two non-smartphones. Throw my iPad in there and the amount needed rises to 6GB no matter what. I calculate $270 per month in wireless bills. We get more data for less than that now, albeit without unlimited voice...

Go Sprint!

The link is relevant. So call now rather than later

...if only Clear had done a decent job in Denver. Indoor coverage is practically nonexistent, and outdoor coverage is spotty. The network seems to work well when you can get service, but it's so incredibly hit-or-miss that the WiMAX radio on my Epic stays off 99.9% of the time.

Glad to see QuickOffice being bought up. I've used their Android app (and I think Palm OS way back...though that may have just been Docs To Go by DataViz) before and been happy with it. I'd load it onto my current phone but ThinkFree Mobile is workable for the little document viewing that I do on my phone.

As for Meebo, they've got a good messenger product. Haven't tried their new thing though, whatever it is. But with the kind of track record they have, they should be able to do some excellent stuff with G+.

Heh, I kind of want to throw my OG Epic into the cellular comparison ring. So you have all three Evo generations, all three Galaxy S generations and the GNex...

Whew, steep upgrade fees for not very many months left in your contract. Glad I bought up when I did.

 

 

Either get a bigger HDD or get your windows operating system on a stick. Or you can stick an extra hdd or ssd for your DVD bay. I already have an ssd in my MacBook Pro and it flies. I'm looking for a good deal on a second ssd.

Trust me, I know. There's no way I'm running windows off of a flash drive, and I don't want to replace my optical drive. When I get the money, I'll get a Crucial m4 256GB, but it's a lower priority behind the SIIi

The two magic words I used were "Buy Up". The support rep, at the beginning of the call, kept telling me that I couldn't move up my upgrade date, but once I made it clear that I was asking to buy the quicker upgrade (rather than getting it for free), he was able to check my account and put the early upgrade request through.

I won't miss the lack of a 64GB phone. 32GB + a 64GB microSDXC is plenty...if I need more storage, there's always the 48GB of Dropbox storage that comes with the phone, plus my 25GB on Google Drive. I count cloud services in here because, with LTE, accessing them will be fast enough that not being on-device really won't matter much.

Oh, and 96GB is WAY bigger than the highest-capacity iPhone, which would be nearly $100 more than the card + GSIII combo.

Multiple bands? Sure, we've got multiple bands!

A, B, C, D, E, F, G

Man, these early upgrade posts make me want to go to a Sprint store and try to get one. Can't hurt I guess.. actual upgrade is 8/1/12

My eligibility was 8/1/12 as well. $45 moved it to 6/1/12. All it took was a call to customer service; the Sprint corp store I stopped by in Austin couldn't do it.

@JohnHovah, my guess is that the fee is priced per line, based on the number of months between now and your upgrade eligibility as it stands, rounded up to the nearest month. The cost appears to be lower than the prorated ETF per-line, but higher than the number of months between now and upgrade eligibility, multiplied by the ETF proration amount per month (someone correct me if I'm wrong here; I haven't looked into ETF calculations).

As for insurance, if you've got five lines, self-insure! At $55 per month for insurance, what's the chance that you'll need to replace two of the five phones in a two-year period with $550 models? Or, in reality, would you need to replace three with $00 phones (I guarantee you the Evo and the GSIII will be aorund that price in a few months off of eBay).

I'm in a similar boat as bigsnake49; my dual monitor desktop is where I get hard work done, unless I'm away from it, in which case my MacBook works just fine (especially now with 8GB of RAM!). But for lighter tasks, my iPad gets used heavily. The proptortion of time spent between my workstation, my notebook and my tablet varies depending on the day, but unless I'm on the road the notebook goes pretty much unused, primarily due to the iPad.

I was very close to getting the Transformer Prime, but the third-gen iPad is actually superior to the Prime tech-wise, and I could get the iPad with built-in VZW LTE. The LTE, paired with a built in GPS, proved to be incredibly useful over the past few weeks when travelling and apartment-searching. I could have done similar things with my Epic, plus a tethering app and a Prime or other WiFi-only tablet, but for my purposes the additional $130 I spent to get the cellular-enabled model has been money well spent.

One thing I wouldn't consider at this point is using the iPad as my only computer. Nor does it negate the need to bring a laptop on trips longer than a day or two. There's just too much it still can't do at this point...and an Android tablet would be in a similar boat, at least for now. Same reason I have at multiple points carried two laptops around when going on trips. Laptop #1 was my MacBook most of the time. Laptop #2 was either a Windows machine (for light-ish gaming; my MacBook's HDD isn't big enough to dual boot) or a Chromebook (for excellent battery life while doing web stuff).

Only ESMR. Sprint will be able to deploy a single CDMA1X 800 carrier everywhere, including the international border coordination zones. However, under current guidelines, Sprint may be able to deploy only a 3 MHz x 3 MHz LTE carrier in the Mexican border zone and no LTE at all in certain areas (e.g. Seattle) of the Canadian border zone. The reason for this is that 800 MHz public safety rebanding is a US endeavor, not necessarily conducted in parallel by Canada and Mexico. In short, within a specified distance of the international boundary, Sprint cannot operate broadband LTE across the same frequencies that Canadian or Mexican carriers/agencies operate iDEN or other narrowband airlinks. Otherwise, Sprint LTE could interfere with those narrowband operations.

 

I have no idea what Mexico is doing (if anything at all) with its equivalent to the PCS G block. In the US, the PCS G used to be part of BAS (Broadcast Auxiliary Service), which provides microwave link style spectrum for TV broadcasters' remote pick ups. Sprint had to foot the bill for relocating BAS from ~2000 MHz up to ~2100 MHz as one of its conditions of being granted the PCS G block nationwide.

 

AJ

Let me rephrase: can Sprint use a G-block 5x5 carrier nationwide, even near border areas (sounds like that's a question mark at this point)? If not, does this agreement change that? I'm aware of the ESMR issues.

WiWavelength, is that in the G Block or in ESMR that they would otherwise be limited to 3x3?

According to Sprint Lab testing, they estimate less than a 3% difference between Verizon 700MHz LTE and Sprint 800MHz LTE coverage difference. That is virtually nothing. If a Verizon LTE signal would travel 15 miles, Sprint's LTE 800 would still be more than 14.5 miles. And at those kinds of distances, there are other factors that would likely be obstructing both signals. For most realistic deployments, you would see no appreciable difference.

 

Robert

Good to hear, for areas where Sprint can deploy a full 5x5 LTE carrier anyway. My bet is that the 3% also accounts for the more robust properties of a narrower carrier (see my previous post re: iDEN).

All that said, I'd be surprised to see an LTE signal making it more than six or seven miles from the tower in decent condition, barring a high-gain antenna on the subscriber side. But since Sprint isn't trying (yet anyway) to do its own take on Verizon HomeFusion, that's fine...the point is to increase mobile coverage, particularly when it comes to in-building signals. Having the signal reach another mile or two in a rural area is an awesome bonus, but my bet is that that's gravy for Sprint.