jamesinclair

 

Speaking of which, do we know primarily what sub-contractor is doing the work around Fresno/Clovis? Or are there many of them?

Id like to know who they are so I make sure I never hire them...

Hopefully April is the magic month for Fresno.

Surprised how quiet this thread has been...

I feel like Samsung has a "bomb" on their hands here. That is, the phone will sell millions, but for sure fall under expectations (again).

Ive just heard zero hype for this thing. The S4 triband had more activity on this forum....

Am I the only one that hasnt hard any excitement for the launch?

Maybe good for sports arenas?

I spoke to my friend from tmobile and told me he had heard that sprint should have lte in fresno /Clovis by May 1st ...

Whats sad is that if you scroll through this thread you can find the exact same post from a year ago....

It is super rare to roam in NYC unless your deep indoors and B26/1x800 will help solve that.

Yeah I was surprised. I wasnt in super deep. I was seated halfway inside of this building, first floor.

http://goo.gl/maps/cQLvT

Great pizza by the way, but the wait was insane.

in NYC its triband device or go home, B25 covers most parts of NYC well but is overburdened during peak times. B41 coverage is very good in NYC and will be needed to balance the load. Take a look at my last speed test above where B25 is abysmal.

In the case where I was roaming inside a building in a very popular area, thats not a B41 issue though. Thats a combo of 26 and more towers needed.

I was in NYC yesterday and was pretty disappointed with the data again.

I was inside a friends apartment near the WIlliamsburg bridge on the Manhattan side, just by Broadway and Clinton and had abysmally slow 3G inside.

Then went to eat at Paulie Gees in Greenpoint Brooklyn and I was actually roaming inside the restaurant. Outside, I was getting slow 3G. Map indicates the nearest towers are 3g/4g upgraded, so they probably need another tower there. The streets were very active with people.

My service is great in the central jersey market, where I spend most of my time, so its always a (data) disappointment when going to NYC. I didnt run any speedtests, but I consider 2+ minutes to get directions from google maps not acceptable. The roaming inside the restaurant also was not so great for my battery life.

Note: I have a standard Galaxy 4, not triband.

Uh, do you think Vodafone might have had something to do with that?

 

AJ

Sure, for some countries. In the same way the DT helped Tmobile.

But they dont have presence in all the countries theyre offering the free service.

And yes, only 1/3 of Americans have a passport, up from 14% before passports were required for travel to Canada and Mexico post 9/11.

Passports still not needed for closed loop Carribean cruise trips I believe.

Note that the big 4 are mroe interested in opper income customers that can afford to travel abroad. Im not saying the Boost brand needs free intl text, but Sprint sure should unless they want to lose business and travelling customers to competitors.

There is a problem with that. The tech is changing. So you can ink agreements with those operators but if they or you change tech then those agreements are worthless. You can buy those operators but now you have to modernize them as you move along the tech evolution. Thats dicey at best. The best course in my opinion is to sit back and wait for VOLT. Then you can start signing international roaming agreements.

Why was Verizon able to offer free international texting, using the same technology?

What do you want, Japan?  That is the other extent of SoftBank holdings.  Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom holds interest in operators in many countries.  Plus, since the rest of the world uses Euro centric, namby pamby GSM and W-CDMA, Deutsche Telekom can ink reciprocal roaming agreements with other operators.  Sprint, being a CDMA2000 operator, cannot do that.

 

AJ

Thats why I think they should do at the very least Canada, Mexico, and the Carribean, where there are CDMA operators. As a bonus, thats where most Americans do their international travel anyway.

And yes, Japan. That should be a given.

 So the difference between the Framily plan and ED plan isn't as large. But I think the Framily plan would still be more expensive if you only have 3 lines.  

It is, especially since the employee discount comes off a bigger slice.

Then factor in that the subsidy model lets you shop around for phones on Amazon and Walmart...

So in the chart posted above for three phones, you save $60 a month on the old plan. Add a few more dollars in savings from the larger employee discount, and then chopc off a couple hundred bucks when you pick up your iphone at Best Buy on sale...

Searching the title with Google usually works.

http://www.google.com/search?q=With+shouts+and+hugs%2C+Sprint+boss+Masayoshi+Son+drives+turnaround+at+struggling+wireless+carrier&oq=With+shouts+and+hugs%2C+Sprint+boss+Masayoshi+Son+drives+turnaround+at+struggling+wireless+carrier&aqs=chrome..69i57&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

From the article:

"In Japan, Mr. Son uses the information to track down the worst underperforming sales employees and their managers, according to two people familiar with the matter. He then pesters them for hourly updates on their progress."

Sounds like a terrible idea! Like hilariously bad. Updating your boss every hour doesnt exactly boost productivity...

What Im shocked about is that under new ownership Sprint has done NOTHING to make their international offerings competetive. I thought for sure that would be a round 1 change.

Tmobile made a huge splash with their international texting + data.

Apparently that hit Verzion, because now theyre advertising free international texting.

And this week tmobile matched verzion by offering free international texting from the US.

Meanwhile, Sprint is stuck in an international pricing plan from the 90s.

At the very least, texting should be included for free in all of North America (and Japan).

Incidentally, is Sprint at all affiliated with Nextel Mexico?

Unless Sprint decides that the ED plans are unprofitable, why would they kick anyone off or refuse a new 2 year contract? With Son in control, I believe this is even less likely to happen. And if its going to happen, it happens when the network is at a new high both publically and actually, now with sprint is still scrambling.

 

What I can see happening is the amount reduced from the retail price of the handset will be reduced for ED 2 year contracts. For example, if average cost after subsidy for a Galaxy 4 is $199, I could see them increasing that price to $249 or $299 in an attempt to organically drive customers to the framily model

 

Sent from my SM-N900V using Tapatalk

Didnt they already pull this last year with the GS4?

It launched for 199 on the competitors, and 249 on Sprint, if my memory is correct.

And then when Target and Best Buy were having major sales (I think 99 for the S4), the tiny text said Sprint was excluded.

Same deal with the iPhone. Huge black friday sales, but not Sprint.

More specifically Blackstone and I think Mckinley.

That tower always gave me garbage range though. Like half mile on a good day with a GS2.

Thats why its so surprising you have it downtown, although sensorly shows other people got it to. 

Well, despite how bad the network is in Fresno, I was still able to use Apple Maps to get someone directions. And there were times that I wondered if I'd get any data, but in the end it was better than I expected. PS, I was at the fairgrounds all day.


Sent from Josh's iPhone 5S using Tapatalk 2

"was able to use data" is not a ringing endorsement...

They are constantly working on a cell tower at the intersection of Fresno and "P" as I can see them from my office window.  Not sure what they are doing, but we still haven't gotten any better 3G.  I am just glad that I am able to get Wimax where I sit.

 

I was in Mendota today, how the heck do they get LTE while the big city gets nothing?

What floor are you on the you get wimax?

I never got wimax downtown at street level.

Except it's not waterproof.  It's water resistant.

Thats all the matters. No one plans on going scuba diving with their phone.

I'm kinda fearful that Clovis wont 3G launch until Fresno is closer to 3G launch. Then again, Sacramento hasn't launched but the surrounding communities have.

 

Just freaking do it already. Knock down the Rodeo site if you have to.

...or put it on the adjacent, superior tower.

Anyone that doesn't believe sprint is moving towards the end of subsidies should go into a store and try and find a 2 year price tag.

That doesnt mean it wont be offered though. Like the plans for seniors, for the blind etc. You have to dig real deep to find that they exist.

Easy pay is a major price hike for my family. We just got a new iphone 5s for $150 at best buy because of a sale. Easy pay would have meant paying more for the phone AND more for the (framily) plan. If the subsidy is baked into my plan, why does framily cost more, and then theres a phone payment on top of it?

As for the S5, I had high hopes and I was very disappointed. I love my S4, but this is like an S4.1

Except with a bigger screen. Which for me is a downside. Samsung, many of us are buying your phone DESPITE the annoyingly large screen, not because of. Im terrified of what the S6 will look like.

Being water proof is a major plus though. Freaking finally. I was very disappointed that the S4 active was stuck with AT&T.

Im also amused that people call the health stuff a gimick. The pedometer has been a huge asset for me in my s4. I cant imagine a phone without one.

Im also interested to hear what the full MSRP is. I cant imagine theyd go for $650 again with so few changes.

Maybe the big surprise is still to come? A full price of $399 or something?

Nice to see Bakersfield go from nothing to everything so quickly

Speaking of October, the permit for the Clovis rodeo grounds site has been issued for about that long. Have they done anything to the site yet? Nooooooo, of course not. Why would you bother working on the site that would be right in the middle of a nice 3G cluster launch? I'm wondering if it will be one of those "accepted" sites like the one south of Fowler, the one off akers/198 in Visalia, and the one west of Farmersville; 3G accepted, but no new panels. What sucks about the rodeo site is that I would have to go into full blown lurk mode in order to get a peek at the base station.

 

Given that there's a middle school and a neighborhood playground right beneath the site and the police station just down the street, I would probably end up being noticeably absent from S4GRU for a period of time to be determined by a judge.

That site is impossible to see. I went to the park and climbed onto the play structure, but couldnt see over the walls. On the main road the entrance is clearly fenced in with numerous "no trespassing signs" so the "I took a wrong turn" excuse wont cut it.

And on top of it, google maps shows an opaque fence around the base anyway.

Are 2 year subsidized upgrades still available in stores like Best Buy and Target?

Hanford was indeed one of Roberts updates.

Whoever the tech is thats doing these installs probably lives in Visalia

Just got off the phone with a Sprint Rep.  I wanted to see if my plan included Direct Connect.  I asked him, since I was on the line, how the upgrade in Kerman looked.  He told me that all call reps just received a tool this week to look up statues of your 5 most used towers and see when they would have May just so happens to beLTE.  So Kerman/Biola/West Fresno it looks like cluster launch by May.  He made it a point to say that they would be launching together.

May just so happens to be 90 days away. It sounds like a placeholder to me: ie, could be next week, could be next month, could be July. I wouldnt place any bets.

As for todays update....

• Lower Central Valley - 60 updates (60 CDMA 800)

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

*loads map*

Fresnooooooooooooooooo

No text message test?

When Im at a sorting event, thats really that only one that matters. Who surfs the web during a game? And calls are hard to hear.

Once everybody has to buy phones unsubsidized by carriers device prices are going to go down.  The Device makers will no longer be able to hide their bloated device prices behind the subsidy.  A 16GB iPhone has no business being $649 retail.  With the volly ATT fired over the weekend, I think the move to unsubsidized devices is well underway and I think when it settles you will see the sweetspot of top end device prices settle in the $400-$500 range. 

 

And there will always still be the used market if you don't want to pay full retail.  I pointed my buddy to swappa where like new iPhone 5s's are selling in the $400 range.  Used prices will probably rise, but it will always still be a cheaper option then retail.

I hope this happens.

The pricing doesnt make sense when compared to tablets which are more powerful, have more expensive screens, bigger batteries...and cost significantly less.