chamb

10 hours ago, S4GRU said:

This sure looks leap years ahead better than my LG V60 Dual Screen!  

Robert

looks nice for sure. I will be waiting to see if the folding causes a problem.  Will something break when you fold it many times a day.  How durable is it going to be?   If it does stand up to years of heavy use, then it just might be a big seller.

23 hours ago, mikejeep said:

Hmm.. I haven't gotten any recent reports of this.. any other software updates recently?

EDIT: Have either of you tried enabling the option under Preferences > General Settings > Use Stale Data Workaround?

It has been acting badly for months.  Probably started with Android 10. Very slow updates to signal levels. I do have the stale data workaround checked, but I am not sure it is helping anything.

Yes, when SCP is running in the background and I bring it up on the full screen, I have a receive level that is bad.  Maybe something like -118.  If I leave it alone for 15 seconds or more ,it will correct and show a correct level of maybe -100.   I do not have to force stop the app.

I need to get into the menus to see if the phone is sort of going to sleep when idle or if SCP is not doing a query quickly or what.   If I keep SCP displayed on the screen the levels have been slow updating and generally not dependable for months since a software update on the phone.

I tend to blame the Samsung s9 rather than SCP.   I THINK the phone is not reporting the level as often as it did in the past. Probably to save the battery or something like that. Not good for us however.

10 hours ago, dkyeager said:

Really depends on if they keep all the sites. The increased amount of low band should definately help. It also could be an easy first root metrics state win for T-Mobile for not too much money just like Shentel did a couple of years ago.

If TM does actually acquire Shentel, they need to keep the Shentel network intact and add TM spectrum to the Shentel Sites.  Shentel built the near perfect network. Shentel is way way better than TM ever will be in this area. Shentel has the backbone established and it was done correctly. 

23 hours ago, JonnygATL said:

Ya know what? I forgot all about HPUE.  I don't recall if there were any solid metrics published that supported it actually making a substantial difference but if anyone can point me in that direction that would be great. Curious to see if it had any real effect and, if so, to what extent.

I found HPUE to be almost worthless.  Before HPUE, I could lock onto band 41 in my home, but it would never work because I could not get a signal from my home to the cell site.   Once I had HPUE capability, it still did not work but occasionally I did at least feel that my signal was received at the cell site, but it only happened a very few times.  One problem was that band 41 carriers were aggregated and I suspect that HPUE would only work with one Band 41 carrier.  It may have worked on paper, but not in my actual use.

I am still using Sprint service, but I actually have band 41 disabled. I get a solid band 25 at good speed so I do not need band 41 and its issues. Using Galaxy s9.

1 hour ago, floorguy said:

heyyyyy   I dont see self employed on there... hahahah

 

Very Good point.  Somebody tell management to quit fooling around with the silly "perks' and silly discounts for only certain people.

This is costing a lot of money and gets next to no retained customers. I do not stay with a cell phone company for a "Popeyes" anything.  I and most other people want excellent service and none of the Tuesday Giveaways.   Spend all your cash on improvements to the network and stop all the playing around.  If you have to give away a Burger King sandwich to hold onto a customer, you must have a bad network.  Get a good network and you will not have to give away hamburgers.

3 minutes ago, bigsnake49 said:

All I know is that people on reddit complaining that they have lost coverage on B41 when they had it before. Or going from 100Mbps+ on B41 to 1-5 Mbps. My MB is still working on B41 so I'm not complaining. 

Turning off Sprint's band 41 is not working well for anybody.  All those Sprint Subs get dropped to band 25 or 26. Why do they think this would not cause severe congestion and get people upset. I would not give them a good grade on how they are handling the network upgrades/conversion. If they keep terrorizing the old Sprint Subs, they will see them fleeing out the door.

All they seem interesting in doing is getting a 5G network established very quickly while ignoring all the havoc they are creating.

3 minutes ago, jthawks said:

T mo brags about band71 with its great for penetrating building's and yet it's worse than than 3g. Now I'm not often on band 71 or band 12 but I except it to work when I am.  

 

Yep, I am still on Sprint, but I do have a T-Mobile phone to play with.  I find t-Mobile service was much worse than Sprint service in the places I traveled in the last month or two.   The T-Mobile network just does not have enough sites and therefor band 2, 4, & 66 just can not cover much of their territory.  Since those bands quite often fail to provide the service, the band 12 and band 71 have to do the lifting.  Those two bands are ave available to latch onto, but they are always totally  congested.

T-Mobile desperately needed the Spectrum owned by Sprint and also the additional cell sites that Sprint had. Even with that, they STILL need to add more NEW sites.   T-Mobile was a marketing powerhouse. People believed what T-Mobile put out.  However, it was a bunch of hype and the service was not nearly as good as claimed. They got away with this for a long time, but without more spectrum they were slowing going to have big issues. 

They do have  a chance to fix this if they ever get the Sprint and T-Mobile networks combined correctly. That remains to be seen.

Before anybody jumps all over me for this post, I do agree that T-Mobile was fine in some areas.  It sure was not fine in a bunch of other areas.  Band 71 did not fix it either. It helped, but did not really fix the issues in many places.

1 hour ago, red_dog007 said:

https://www.shentel.com/news/2020/july/20q2 earnings release

Some notes on this possible acquisition.

So the 90-days after the Sprint/TMobile merger is up.  TMobile and Shentel did not negotiate a new agreement where Shentel would continue as a TMobile affiliate.

T-Mobile has a period of 60 days to purchase the assets of the Shentel's wireless operations at 90% EBV.  This period ends August 31th.  If T-Mobile does not purchase Shentel's wireless assets, Shentel has 60 days to purchase T-Mobile's legacy network and subscribers in Shentel's service area.  If after these 60 days Shentel does not purchase out T-Mobile then T-Mobile must sell or decommission it's network and customers in Shentel's service area.

 

1.) Would there be reason for T-Mobile to not have purchased Shentel's wireless business out August 1st or the 3rd? Would they wanna wait until the 30th? Since there is no news on T-Mobile making their move is it a higher chance that Shentel's wireless survives this merger?

2.) If Shentel makes it past the 30th, do they have the capital to purchase TMobile's assets and customers?

 

Now for spectrum.  If Shentel buys T-Mobile out or T-Mobile exists the service area, in both these cases does Shentel get the rights to all of T-Mobile's spectrum portfolio? Only the Sprint spectrum? What about the 800MHz they utilize?

Then what if Shentel expansion?  I know they made an agreement with Sprint a while back that gave them the option to expand deep into Eastern KY.  If Shentel expands into new service areas will that force T-Mobile out?

All Good Valid Questions.  If I remember correctly, I think T-Mobile has to assist with financing should Shentel want to buy out T-Mobiles assets.  If my memory is good on that point, it might make a difference.

T-Mobile surely has their hands full of issues in the country.  If I were in their shoes, I would be very happy to have Shentel upgrade and manage all assets in the current Shentel area.  Shentel's Sprint network is very very good. They built a network that was better then Sprint was elsewhere.  There is no question that Shentel would do a much better job combining the networks than T-Mobile would.    T-Mobile really needs Shentel to continue their good work. I hope T-Mobile  realizes that.

T-Mobile's network in most of the Shentel territory is not good. Shentel's Sprint network is very very good. Shentel could easily combine them efficiently and have a superior network to anybody else.

2 hours ago, Galaxyguy said:

I switched late last year to T-Mobile and I've noticed T-Mo has done a lot of upgrades in the northern Shenandoah Valley within the past 2 months. I highly doubt they would have done the upgrades if they had any thought they would have to shut down the network within two years. 

Band 71 has been added to many sites in the area and I think I may have found a brand new site active near Winchester Medical Center, unless it's some sort of DAS. I'm not really sure yet. I'm inside the building and have a very strong signal on B66 and B2. 

Some of the things I see and hear about what T-Mobile has been doing makes me think that they might be one big screwed up organization.  I hope I am wrong, but so far, things are not looking good.

Just now, davidtm said:

What would happen to us Sprint customers under each of those options?

Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk
 

The Sprint Customers surely have a lot of value.  Nobody would allow them to fade away.  Something will be done.

The best option is for Shentel to continue somehow with this area.  They built a killer network.  Much much better than any other network in this area.  Things will go downhill real fast if Shentel is out of the picture.  

Actually, the Shentel network is so good that the Shentel sites need to be the backbone of the new network.  Add t-mobile spectrum to the Shentel sites.   Shentel is near perfect here and T-Mobile is very very poor.  Shentel can fix that real quick.

47 minutes ago, greenbastard said:

All the 600 Mhz sites in my area were already part of a very dense network, so coverage was never an issue. It seems like every 600 Mhz upgrade was for capacity issues since T-Mobile was also deploying the 5x5 block they had in the AWS-3 band.

 

Your area must be unique. I NEVER see dense T-Mobile coverage.  T-Mobile is actually the worst carrier by far in my eyes. They normally do not know what dense means.   To make a good network, it is going to be very very expensive because they are starting with a very poor network.  T-Mobile was a great marketing device, but not a great cell phone carrier.

12 hours ago, greenbastard said:

One thing I do like about T-Mobile is that they really put a lot of energy into taking care of Houston. T-Mobile pulled a bunch of permits from the City of Houston on June 10. Seems like they're not sitting on those permits (which Sprint used to do).

From the few towers I checked, it seems like they are prioritizing towers that were left behind during the 600 Mhz upgrades first. The towers that received the first round of 600 Mhz upgrades have not had any permits submitted.

They are trying to get two different results with the upgrades.  The 600 Mhz upgrade was to get more range from the site to cover fringe areas.  The 2500 upgrade is to get faster speeds & capacity in major population areas.

2 hours ago, Trip said:

They've done four-sector sites down where I grew up.  600/700 only though, so no 5G-NR at this time.

Are those antennas 600/700 only, or do they also cover PCS/AWS?

- Trip

Maybe there will be more antennas hoisted up yet.

8 hours ago, dkyeager said:

With the Fed basically throwing money at public firms perhaps this needs to be all rethought.  I wonder what percentage of T-Mobile customers are currently being carried due to Covid-19?  If this level is relatively small, perhaps they should be borrowing lots at this time to speed up the process significantly.  However they should not become error prone.  properly done, they have a very good window of opportunity.

They seem to be totally intent on killing Sprint band 41 and activating T-Mobile 5G on band 41. This does need to be done, but I seem to see quite a few people complaining about the result being bad. Some people need to actually turn off 5G on their new phones and use 4G.  So, if this is true, they are not getting it right at least in some places.

   They do need to somehow get band 2/25 straightened out. In many cases,Sprint has loads of band 25 that T-Mobile has not touched.

This is a massive job and I have some doubts that they will do it and not cause lots of issues.

in my area(Shentel) T-Mobile is nowhere close to being up to Shentel's standards.   Shentel's Sprint service works very very good. T-Mobile is a disaster here.  If T-Mobile has service like this in other parts of the country, we are using the wrong network for the base network. 

1 hour ago, dkyeager said:

Likely Samsung S20s in areas covered by T-Mobile towers.

I got the message a week ago.  Have a Samsung S9 on Shentel.

4 hours ago, dkyeager said:

I sent debug info for common situations where T-Mobile band 2 is seen by SCP as band 41 on Sprint. Occasionally is reported correctly for a a short period of time. Debug on the LG G4 showed the correct band along with a LG v20 on Sprint and a Moto G7 power rooted on T-Mobile (the PCIs on the other bands were different.)

 

Thanks

  Ahhhh, A couple of times I saw t-mobile band 41 in my neighbor sites and I knew that was wrong.  It was coming from a known t-mobile site but the site only has band 2 & 12.   Had me guessing.   I saw this on a Galaxy S9.   When it shows this, it does not have a valid receive level.  Shows some level like (-190325643)  Yes weird.

1 hour ago, ingenium said:

I wonder how they'll handle the regulations that a phone can use any network that it sees for 911 calls, if those networks are all VoLTE only. Roaming will also be interesting, especially for foreign visitors whose home networks may not support VoLTE.

Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk
 

Foreign visitors can grab a cheapie Prepaid phone for their limited time visit. 

9 minutes ago, Dkoellerwx said:

I'm pretty sure that was the point of the post. How much information from one source or another made its way here. We were spoiled with all that information. Seems doubtful we get much out of T-Mobile.

I hope you are wrong about that.  T-Mobile has some real crazy people in the organization, but that does not mean that they would not be good people. There has to be some really smart people there or the company would not have survived.  Some of the crazy people will be smart and some of the smart people will be crazy.  The organization has many people that are just crazy over cell phones, data and wireless.  Anyway, maybe we will be lucky enough to have loads of info become available.  We sure do hope so.  Sprint had some crazy people too and some smart people also.  Many of them are here on this site in some way.

3 minutes ago, bigsnake49 said:

In order to have massive MIMO at that frequency and to have a reasonably sized antenna each of the antenna elements will have to be a smaller and smaller fraction of the wavelength. Efficiency suffers when your element size is an ever decreasing size of the wavelength. If I remember my RF theory classes, coverage might suffer. Of course a lot has changed since the 1970s when I took that class :).

You are almost in the same class as I am.  Actually I date back before the 70"s.  I have seen antenna technology change quite often.  This is exactly why I asked the question.  I am too old to be involved with designing or installing cell sites anymore.  However, it just may be possible to find somebody smarter than me that could figure it all out.  You have to start thinking less about the physical size antenna and more about the electronics at the antenna.  Some laws just can not be broken with RF, but who ever thought those big radios on the ground could be made much more efficient, sized way down and become part of the top mounted antenna.

In the 60's, I never dreamed that fiber would be between the base station cabinet and the antennas. We did not even have cell phones.

14 hours ago, Abdual Rodriguez said:

T-Mobile and Sprint have no plan on how to commingle the 2 teams and networks. Its only a couple of weeks in and already messy. And TMO has the same elitist attitude towards their peers from Sprint. Everyone is hoping for the best, as well as the commitment to not layoff anyone for a period of time (3 years?). Trending in the wrong direction. 

 

Abdul Rodriguez

 

Yes, things might get sort of messy.  The best talent might depart and it could be from either side. 

23 minutes ago, bigsnake49 said:

You already have 4x4 MIMO on band 71. You just can't have massive MIMO because the antenna would be huge.

Is it possible that somebody might come up with a way to do MIMO on band 71 with some kind of antenna magic?  Consider how small the antennas are for band 71 in the phone.  Any company that can come up with a MIMO antenna for band 71 would probably have all the market to themselves for awhile.  I do realize the antennas in a phone are not going to ever be the same at a base station. But we can hope that the base station  antennas can be improved.

20 minutes ago, dkyeager said:

We have grown beyond one carrier.  Try 5ggru.com or wirelessguru.com

What I liked about S4GRU was that the site drew the technical people rather that the ones that had phone problems  from drops or water issue and billing issues.   Technical issues got discussed here and solved.  Problem children were on REDDIT or similar sites with crazy issues that they often created themselves. 

15 minutes ago, RedSpark said:

I'm sure every site across both networks is getting a full audit. I agree. It would make sense to make all the upgrades on one tower visit/climb.

If they have to borrow money to do a high amount of upgrades, now is the time to do it with interest rates so low. They still have to pay off the loans at some point, but very low interest is sure attractive.  Sprint might have been borrowed to the hilt, but T-Mobile  has loads of debt too. I am not sure how much more they can borrow to do massive upgrades.

39 minutes ago, joshnys8913 said:

What's next US Cellular? LOL! 

If I was responsible for managing US Cellular and wanted to stay in business, I would try to get a very good new roaming agreement with the new T-Mobile.  Even that may not be enough to survive, but that is their best chance to remain in business.