iansltx

I've seen 20/20 or so on most speed tests I've done with my iPad in Austin. It's not out of the question to get a few Mbps more than that on VZW's 10x10 LTE network if you're in a less-loaded area. I will agree on the Evo though; upload speeds have been capped at 1 Mbps or 1.5 Mbps for a long time now.

Back when WiMAX first came out though, you could hit 15/5 or better in Atlanta. So I'm still of the opinion that the 1.5 Mbps upload cap is kinda bunk.

Your eyes are not deceiving you. Looks like they ran out of their on-sale stock of microSD cards.

In an ideal world, if Sprint bought MetroPCS, they'd pretty quickly shutter MetroPCS's own CDMA and LTE networks, add MetroPCS's PCS holdings to Sprint's on Sprint's own cell sites, sell MetroPCS's AWS spectru to T-Mobile and either set up MetroPCS as an MVNO like Virgin Mobile and Boost or just push MetroPCS customers over to one of Virgin Mobile's plans. The bonus here would be Virgin Mobile customers probably getting LTE. Not that this will happen...unless MetroPCS offers a really good price (since Sprint tried recently). However if something did go down I think the above would be the most intelligent way to go about things. Heck, MetroPCS's relationships with handset manufacturers might be worthwhile to keep, since they've gotten manufacturers to turn out handsets in the $150 range with halfway-decent specs and LTE...

Why would it eliminate a lot of phones? There are plenty of people using non-stolen phones out there

Apparently those techs (and others AT&T) are willing to confuse poor data performance (which Sprint does have issues with...but those are being fixed) with outright throttling by the provider (which CricKet and T-Mobile do after you hit their respective capped plans' caps). Of course, this is another reason Sprint needs to get NV and band-aid fixes pushed through as quickly as possible, because 400 kbps is no way run run a modern cellular network (and 400 kbps is on the high end of what some people see these days).

Eventually Verizon will have PCS LTE, but that won't be for another two or three years. So yeah, Verizon-to-Sprint phones would end up being 3G-only, and wouldn't have CDMA 800 built in. But hey, if that gets folks with $200 (on contract) smartphones moving over to Sprint, Network Vision should be able to support them (though getting more 3G phones on Sprint's network isn't quite what we need at this point). One phone that would be awesome as a VZW-to-Sprint port would be the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx. Best battery life of any LTE phone out right now, thanks to its monstrous (3700 mAh) built-in battery. I'm not particularly in the market for such a thing, since I now have 4200 or so mAh of capacity spread between two batteries for my GSIII, but folks who don't want to carry around an extra battery and still want to beat their phones to a pulp and still have battery at the end of the day...well, the Razr Maxx allows that.

Par for the course for AT&T. They don't have the best network now (Verizon does), they won't have the best network later (Sprint will) and they don't have the best pricing for a nationwide network (T-Mobile and Sprint do). They don't even have an exclusive on the iPhone or the iPad. It's a wonder they keep getting net adds.

The record comparison isn't lost on me, even if most of my music hasn't seen anything more physical than a hard drive platter or an Ethernet cable I seem to recall the slight skipping issue while playing music on the phone using one of the stock players. However it's been awhile since I tested it as WinAmp's crappy UI is more than balanced by its gapless, flawless playback capabilities (for me anyway...and yes I paid $5 for gapless playback). I also haven't had issues with AmazonMP3. Maybe the stock player is just CPU-intensive or memory-intensive, and you need to quit some background apps? Stock 32GB updated pebble blue here too

*shrugs* FB has used ~66MB over the past half-month over the cellular network on my phone. It represents maybe 12% of my total cellular usage. On the other hand, I'll add my voice to the choir about Sprint having excellent voice service practically everywhere...but data is a whole other ball game.

As far as TMo's spectrum holdings are concerned, you can make a network work with those frequencies...look at what Sprint has done...however you aren't going to be in very many rural areas. T-Mobile has a decent amount of capacity between PCS and AWS, and it seems like they're already doing something akin to NV with RRUs, enhanced backhaul and new LTE-capable equipment from Ericsson and NSN. However I can pretty much guarantee that there will be 10% or so of their towers that will continue poking along on EDGE or GPRS with T1 backhaul for the foreseeable future.

Just keep in mind that hitting 40 Mbps on AT&T and keeping that up for three and a half minutes will net you a gigabyte of data usage. That's $10 or $15 right there. The network is really fast because everyone has to watch their usage or pay a lot when they go over...and also because AT&T can sell themselves a ton of backhaul if they want, since they're the ILEC in Atlanta. As for MVNOs taking/not taking a ton of bandwidth, until recently MVNOs coudln't get good smartphones on Sprint. You use more data when you have a phone that is worth using more data on, and phones like the Optimus V (as much as I like the OV) weren't the ticket. As for how Sprint's adding capacity via Network Vision, let's put things into perspective. Its 3G network has around 10 Mbps of capacity, in real-world terms, on the downlink of any given 5x5 spectrum slice if it's all dedicated to EvDO (which, in many cases, it isn't...many cell sites have fewer EvDO carriers than that). LTE on that same spectrum is on the order of 35 Mbps, though 25-30 Mbps is probably more realistic. So spectrum is much more efficiently used here, even if Sprint didn't have a whole new band (PCS G) that they could use for LTE (so they're getting 30+ Mbps per sector without impacting capacity elsewhere). In many markets, Sprint has enough "spare" spectrum in PCS A-F that they could launch two LTE carriers (one in G, one in A-F) without issue, for 60+ Mbps of capacity per sector, compared with 10 Mbps or less on a 3G site (and that's assuming 3G had proper backhaul, which in many cases it didn't). And that's just on the PCS side. Throw in a 20MHz TDD-LTE channel on 2500MHz and you have another 60+ Mbps of capacity over a portion of the cell. Throw in a 5x5 LTE carrier on SMR and you have another 30 Mbps with better coverage. Granted, PCS is the only thing we're seeing right now, but even with PCS-only LTE (and the associated backhaul bear) Sprint has much more bandwidth to go around, allowing more people to experience better speeds without things slowing down to a crawl like they have on EvDO (except where I now live ).

Well, look what losing a few hundred thousand customers can do! My bet is that T-Mobile and Sprint will both use unlimited as a differentiator, while AT&T and Verizon...won't. Particularly Verizon, since they have so much LTE coverage now.

Probably. Particularly since antennas built for PCS A-F won't take much additional tuning to be made compatible with G...and my guess is that we'll see CricKet, MetroPCS, USCC, C-Spire and other smaller carriers put LTE on PCS. Glad to see MetroPCS trying to secure LTE roaming agreements, where AT&T and Verizon seem intent on doing everything they can not to do so, except on thier own terms (e.g. Verizon's LTE in Rural America program).

They're probably confusing LTE with Verizon/AT&T's 700MHz LTE, which does give better coverage and in-building penetration for a given number of cell sites...and more capacity vs. older technologies. Whereas Sprint's LTE gives comparable coverage but significantly more capacity on PCS...more coverage will come later.

Since I'm not in a huge hurry to replace my 16GB card, I grabbed the 64GB one just now. 96GB of storage on my phone FTW!

Count me in on the crowd who wants to see the clip. Hopefully it ends up on the station's website or YouTube though. Also, hopefully Sprint is magically able to turn on Baltimore at that point (maybe they got enough backhaul going over the past week or two?).

At the Sprint store at Gateway in Austin yesterday I hit 12/1.5 on WiMAX. If only I could've gotten speeds like that everywhere lol

Edited my original post to reflect the fact that the battery is just another 2100 mAh one. It isn't actually an extended battery. Sorry for the confusion.

Grabbed an extended extra battery + charger ($50 + tax...eep) from the Sprint store today, since I'll be using GPS on my phone a good bit and thus may need two batteries to ensure that my phone is always functional, even at the end of the day after a hard run. The battery charger/stand is well-built, though the built-in phone cradle has no electrical interface; it's just a groove that's appropriately dimensioned to hold an SIII. Behind this groove is a covered pocket for a battery, and on the rear of the device you have a microUSB port. The battery+charger combo includes a microUSB charger (one-piece; there's no full-sized USB port here). The lack of a charge connector for the phone in the Samsung cradle means that I now have two microUSB connectors on my desk (one for the charger, one for the phone), but it also means that if I wanted to put the phone into the dock in portrait mode, I could. As it stands though, horizontal (desk clock) orientation makes a lot more sense.

Could you post that e-mail's actual contents? I'm in a WiMAX area now and if they'll give a free LTE sleeve when it comes out to all WiMAX sleeve users, heck, I'll buy an iTouch and a sleeve!

Last I checked, MetroPCS does not sell service outside areas where it has it's own network in place. which, by the way, is now mostly overlaid with LTE. Too bad they're using narrow channel widths (narrower than 5x5 in many places), paired with insufficient back haul, or so I hear.