Thomas L.

The round table format ate hairy spiders when drunk. Its towers became bloated after swallowing a mouthful of baby formula. The baby ate his poisoned barbeque chicken ribs without A1 steak sauce. Fix the chair leg before somebody trips and breaks their sister's glass. It peed shards of LTE droppings from bubbly fermented apples. Doctors gouge the helpless when options appear dangerously silly for perpendicular slicing. Around 2pm there was another explosive diarrhea attack that drove Dan to SMS SoftBank, which viciously countered MetroPCS;s audacity to compete. Meanwhile, Mexicans discovered sparkly water of Rio which tasted like rainbows. LightSquared, however, beamed sparkly clusters of spectrum at GPS, causing multitudes of bananas being paranoid about world domination. This exacerbated an enormous flock of pelicans into your mother's house. Then seagulls confronted Darla with weapons manufactured in Korea

I think if they had a GAN/UMA based system like T-Mobile and some other providers, it would be great and alleviate a lot of those concerns. GAN/UMA essentially makes your phone it's own femtocell (like its own Airave) over wifi, Sprint's network would just see you as connected to another base station

The idea of a decent reliable official wifi calling tech that allows you to use your number and is totally integrated, as T-Mobile has had and other companies like Republic Wireless offer would be an awesome advantage. Full bars wherever you can get WiFi would be awesome!!!

I've never experienced anything but the opposite unless I was on the edge of a 4G cell, in which case data was unreliable in general. In fact, if I have even just a decent 4G connection the loading is just about instantaneous both in terms how quickly it begins and how long it takes to finish. What device do you have? Is this behavior the same even when you know you have a good 4G signal?

Same here, at home in South SJ/Willow Glen and in Saratoga as well.

That's how it should work. In fact, the ideal will be, depending on what Sprint does with Clearwire, if you're in a Clearwire area with LTE, you will be on the LTE 2600, then if you go out of range or there is congestion (unlikely) you will switch to LTE 1900, then as a last option you'll go to LTE 800. Since the LTE 800 signal has better penetration and farther reach, they want to keep congestion on that as low as possible, as it will be serving more people than either the 1900 or 2600 would.

Interesting, I wonder if this vulnerability is resolvable, and, the question begs to me asked.... did WiMax have the same problem?

Your 3G coverage might improve, but the 4G is likely to be equivalent to your 3G right now - that is until later on with LTE 800 sometime in mid 2013, but you'd need a new phone for it anyway. If you are having trouble right now, I'd go ahead and ask for the Airave - you can always send it back when your signal gets better. Thomas

So basically they seem very similar to regular towers, but with the antennas for each sector much much closer together, right?

Are you referring to those towers that look like they're just a pole with kind of a cylinder at the top sorta? I've been curious about those too.

You're assuming that it's purely an issue of money that's keeping them from deploying more quickly, when in reality I think they're moving as quickly as they possibly can already. Remember, Network Vision will both save Sprint a lot of money and will help to retain customers... though it's for different reasons, they want it done just as badly as we do.

Sprint (along with some other carriers) has panels on a building on campus at my college, and I took a picture of what looked like NV panels to me. What do you guys think?

What's involved when they have to go back to the towers to install equipment for LTE 800? Is it just an additional carrier card or are they actually going to have to go up the towers and do a lot of additional work? How labor and time intensive is it compared to the original network vision upgrade of sites? I'm just curious as to, when they actually start rolling it out, how long that overlay will take. Also, what are the FIT markets for LTE 800? Is it Waco again? Do they have it up?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services It's an international GSMA accredited standard that is looking to make the following things interoperable like SMS and MMS: Standalone Messaging 1-2-1 Chat Group Chat File Transfer Content Sharing Social Presence Information IP Voice call Best Effort Video call Geolocation Exchange Network based blacklist Capability Exchange based on Presence or SIP OPTIONS

I thought this was interesting, does anyone know if Sprint has any intention of implementing the RCS standard on their LTE network as well? http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/31/metropcs-launches-the-first-rich-communication-services-lte-support/

I was unable to connect to LTE at all on Saratoga in the places I had it previously, but I noticed right near Saratoga and 85 there was a tower that looked like it had NV work being done on it, so maybe they had deactivated it there as they were working on it in the area... I don't know.

There is expansion, but more slowly, and they seem to be hitting the north (and by north I mean practically Sacramento) bay much more heavily than any other area. I can also say that I in the South Bay am not seeing LTE in a lot of areas I did previously... they might have started the blocking.

LMAO, that would be one butt-ugly logo.

I have to say, I think all of the comments from Sprint saying 'Oh no we don't plan on acquiring Clearwire at least not anytime soon' etc etc is mainly to keep the stock price low, especially after that 70% increase in share price after the announcement was made and rumors started flying. I think Sprint is being smart about this, playing it close to the cuff until it's essentially a done deal, the same way Softbank and Sprint handled their negotiations and partnership.

Data only devices tend to have much better reception due to design and the fact that they can usually consume higher power. Sent from my SPH-L710 using Xparent ICS Blue Tapatalk 2

I don't think that Sprint's financial situation has been the main constraint on NV - I think there is just a finite number of RF engineers, contractors, negotiators, etc - all of those things that you mentioned. If Sprint could speed up deployment of NV I think they would do it... they save on roaming, they have happier customers, they save on power consumption with the consolidation of the IDEN and CDMA networks and the new equipment. Sprint has EVERY reason to want NV to go as quickly as possible, because the more quickly it's deployed the more quickly they can really start earning money back on it.

In the past in was because of Japan's use of the Japan-only PDC cell phone system, which was an analog of GSM in Europe and TDMA in the US. There was no actual GSM network for a SIM card to be used with. There are R-UIMs (like CDMA SIMs) that can be used with KDDI's CDMA in Japan, BUT, as a way of making it more costly for non-Japanese countries to market cell phones in Japan and therefore give a boost to Japanese manufacturers, they reversed the TX/RX (send and receive) bands for CDMA in Japan so that CDMA phones in Japan were incompatible with those anywhere else in the world. HOWEVER, with the arrival of WCDMA/UMTS 3G in Japan in the last five years or so, you can finally buy a prepaid SIM that will work with unlocked phones on some Japanese networks, the only caveat is this: "Due to past criminal abuse of prepaid phones, phone sellers are required to verify the identity and place of residence of their customers. Typical proof can be in the form of a Japanese driver's license, a Japanese passport or an alien registration card. Some stores will accept foreign passports along with a hotel address as verification." (Via http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2223.html) The Japanese phone market became more open with baby steps and almost in spite of itself - a bit like what is happened in the US.

Actually, I think one of the main reasons Sprint hasn't moved the using SIM cards yet is because, unless you do what Verizon has done (kind of jury-rigging their authentication system to allow one SIM card for LTE and CDMA), the SIM card would only switch over the LTE part of the service and not the CDMA (meaning you might end up with working LTE data but not CDMA voice and data). That particular jury-rigging that Verizon has caused them a lot of grief on their network and a few outages I believe as well. I believe that the only reason Verizon implemented SIM cards in their LTE devices with their jury-rigging technique is because it was a requirement placed on the spectrum that they purchased (they couldn't prevent carrier interoperability, same reason their Galaxy S3 is a world phone, for example). As LTE networks worldwide and in the US start to become compatible with one another, it's more likely that we'll see Sprint start to use SIM cards... All that said, how does the SIM card work in the iPhone? Can you simply switch a Sprint nano-SIM into a Verizon iPhone 5 and have it work? If so it would indicate that Sprint is just being a handset bully.

I've decided that that white earpiece is some kind of conference world status symbol used specifically to show you have a simultaneous interpreter or something: I see it at the UN, at big conferences... I study translation and interpretation and it's pretty ubiquitous! Soon I hope to find out why!

If anyone is awake, Softbank is having a press conference as we speak: www.softbank.co.jp/en/news/info/2012/20121015_01/ Sent from my SPH-L710 using Xparent ICS Blue Tapatalk 2