Thomas L.

That's such a ridiculous policy. On T-Mobile if the phone supports VoLTE it works - my phones I bought when living in China work on VoLTE on T-Mobile no problem. I don't get why they do that. AT&T's network is pretty subpar for such a large carrier anyway honestly, so I'm not surprised they have such backward policies.

Neither am I, but since they insist that they can't compete successfully apart, if the merger isn't approved then it would seem to me that would be their only option if they want to survive.

If the merger doesn't go through, I think it would be interesting to see Sprint and T-Mobile work on a network sharing agreement, or a collaborative build-out WITHOUT having to merge completely. Bell and Telus did it in Canada when they did their 3G build-out and were abandoning CDMA, and it's not uncommon with carriers in different parts of the world.

LTE roaming is controlled by the SIM card, which can updated over-the-air. PRL is a CDMA legacy feature.

Is there a page where they break this down or where I can see the transcript of his statements? Was it part of the fiscal report?

In terms of the Essential Phone (which I bought on Prime Day, pretty great deal), there's no reason that it shouldn't work other than if one needs an upgrade to an ISIM to support VoLTE. Essential Phone supports VoLTE on any carrier that has it enabled following the standard, like T-Mobile. US carriers are unfortunate in the way they've enabled VoLTE (I have no idea what AT&T in particular, as a GSM carrier, restricts what devices can use VoLTE on their network). In the rest of the world phones are designed to work on VoLTE just like they do on HSPA+ and GSM - it doesn't have to be enabled on the user's account, it just works if the phone supports it, a lot like T-Mobile's implementation in the US.

I would guess that the areas where Sprint will initially enable T-Mobile roaming with coincide with their VoLTE launch areas.

Semi-related question: what's involved in getting the third carrier online? And will Sprint move forward with four carrier aggregation that they had indicated they would eventually deploy.

Yeah I can't see Sprint making any big moves to be honest, they haven't shown a huge interest in that kind of improvement.

If the device supports it, it will use it for 911 calls, is my experience. I know once for some reason I had set my LG V20 to LTE only on a custom ROM and couldn't make any calls. I needed to make a 911 call however, and it latched onto... Verizon 1X I think to make the call.

I really don't see why it is that you think that if you don't have public wifi then you wouldn't use an MB. The MagicBox is a repeater for Sprint's network requiring essential zero exposure or expenditure for the retail provider beyond electricity. It is also zero maintenance or setup. It's a highly superior solution in my view.

As bigsnake said, KDDI still has their network in Japan, there are a few European operators that still have 450mhz CDMA networks for critical use and rural/low-population areas, and, as I mentioned, the largest CDMA operator in the world, China Telecom.

Not as quickly as you think. China Telecom for example still has 250 million customers on their CDMA/LTE network. China won't be phasing out their 2G networks anytime soon, their 3G networks will go first (W-CDMA and especially TD-SCDMA). CDMA's 3G and 2G are compatible standards so will maintain that as well. Between them and Sprint, CDMA will survive, but it will be niche.

Wait, why exactly are people not wanting to be around during integration? Why is that the trigger for leaving?

Of course neither AT&T nor Verizon are contesting this because they know it will decrease competition in the market which has put so much pressure on their margins and networks both.