jamesinclair

Sounds like a shady company.

Um...let's follow the money.

Brightline is a higher-speed rail system under construction in Florida. It is being developed by All Aboard Florida, a wholly owned subsidiary of Florida East Coast Industries (FECI

Florida East Coast Industries (FECI) is Florida’s oldest and largest commercial real estate, transportation, and infrastructure holding company.

FECI was purchased in 2007 by equity funds managed by Fortress Investment Group, LLC.

 

The private equity parent of Coral Gables-based Florida East Coast Industries is getting a new owner, which means that the Brightline Miami-to-Orlando passenger train project is as well.

 

New York-based hedge fund Fortress Investment Group (NYSE: FIG) announced earlier this week that it has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Tokyo, Japan-based SoftBank Group Corp.

 

https://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/news/2017/02/16/parent-of-brightline-train-project-to-be-acquired.html

Hm, Softbank, where do I know them from...

Apologies if this has been covered already, but the Sprint sponsorship of Pokemon Go is finally paying off.

Background: Pokemon Go had an event where 20,000 people went to a single park to use their game

Problem: 20,000 people accessing a data-intensive game in a very small area is bad news

Situation: Sprint was only provider to deploy COWs (I assume thanks to my tweet)

Problem: Event was a complete disaster because the only people who could play were Sprint and Tmobile users. No one else could connect.

And now the Pokemon Go community is furious at Verizon and AT&T but speaking well of Sprint

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/6pqgmg/so_apparently_verizon_chose_not_to_deploy_pop_up/?st=j5mm6260&sh=74febf81

Dat word of mouth tho.

Either it went well and they wanna keep adding, or it didn't go well enough and they wanna reach goal. I actually signed my dad and brother up for this promo, the actual order process went smoothly but after that things went south. In the email they send you they say once you initiate the number port it will take up to 10 minutes, well instead it took 24 hours. I thought something went wrong and calling in nobody could find an account or even had a clue of the promo, ended up getting passed around like a hot potato. Not a good way to welcome a new customer.

For my brother they kept saying his card was declined when it wasn't, so he told them to just cancel the order. Next day it goes through anyway and they ship him a SIM card. By then he'd already ported to Verizon and washed his hands of Sprint over that ordeal.

 

Also been reading many reports of people porting in then back out sometimes as soon as an hour later because the coverage wasn't up to par.

 

So based on my personal experiences and other similar reports to my own experience have me leaning towards it not going well enough, but who knows (hence me also suggesting it did go well)

My GF switched over. There was trouble at first, because they said her phone was reported as lost/stolen, and it took 2/3 calls to AT&T to get it resolved and made available to Sprint.

So not as easy as just sliding a new SIM card in.

But she is very happy with her new unlimited data, loves the HD voice calls, and has had no issues with service.

Maybe not sell off your Nextel holdings next time?

Pokemon Go is having an event in Chicago later this month for 20,000 people. Ticketed event.

Sprint, obviously, is a major sponsor.

Any word on them bringing in the COWS?

Would be highly embarrassing if the event fails because no one can connect. Conversely, would be good marketing if only Sprint customers have a good connection

I finished reading this report, and the thing that stood was the Sprint network is very inconsistent. Now you know why they are giving free service for a year. 

Indeed. My mom switched from Sprint to Verizon 2 years ago, and I wont even bring up the new free offer because Sprint still hasn't done anything to fix all the issues in her market (Fresno). According to the map on this website, a significant portion of the towers are still 3G only (in 2017!) and that doesnt even get to the issue that they havent added any towers in what looks like 10 years.

Meanwhile, where I live, my gf will be switching to Sprint this week because the service here is good.

Sprint competes nationwide, but performance is very regional.

After searching around, it looks like my Nexus 5x isn't working because it's registered as a Prepaid device (when I used it on Ringplus).  I am going to see if I can submit a ClickIT ticket to get this thing moved back to postpaid eligible.

Hm, Im seeing a good amount of reports on Reddit on people being able to switch from prepaid.

My gf is going to switch next week from AT&T prepaid so I hope its not an issue.

Im also curious about how this will affect the stock price.

I'm going overseas (Russia), I have two options.

 

Option 1) Use Sprint open world (not available anymore, I'm grandfathered in) = 3 cents per MB at 3G speeds which is $30/GB.

 

OR

 

Option 2) The current Sprint global roaming = free unlimited 2G speed but can purchase speed pass at up to 4G speeds. $25 for a week but limited to 100mb a day.

 

I will be there for a month, I'm kind of torn on this, All opinions would be helpful.

Remember, once you drop Open, its gone forever.

Do you have any plans for Latin America?

1GB free 3G + free calls is not matched by the new plan at all.

Theres no specific thread about the new free plan right?

RE: Airave LTE

Thanks guys, I guess Ill look into upgrading my dads unit eventually. 99% of the airave is for him to make calls that dont cut off, so while those LTE improvements sound good, theyre not a must have right now.

Modern single radio phones aka; every new device, can be on LTE and receive calls.

I still dont understand. If I am at home, my Wifi speed and LTE-from-airave speed will be the same right, since theyre both limited by my Comcast speed?

e/CSFB

 

AJ

?

Whats the point of LTE on Airave? If you already have Wifi, why do you need your home data turned into LTE?

For someone who has an Airave because without it calls get cut off, would the 3 be an upgrade?

I didnt realize Verizon was including Mexico and Canada too these days.

Thanks Tmobile!

Again, depends on usage. I don't know what's so hard to understand about that. I'd venture to say that the average person doesn't vacation for a month. However, even for someone who does, are they really going to stay under 1 GB of data usage for the entire month? If you use 10 GB, for example, over the course of a month it would be $300 on Open World (which still isn't terrible IMO) vs $100. Or if you don't want to pay for the high speed data, don't take the buy-up. That's an option. Or keep Open World, that's also an option that they're offering.

My sister has been in Colombia for 3 weeks. I told her about the 1GB limit. She is at .56

So I am not speaking in hypotheticals here.

Our current cost is $0. The new plan would be $75. Thats outrageous.

And when Sprint did that people in this very thread were complaining about confusion. So like I said, it's impossible to please all of the people all of the time.

 

To your other point, things are usually not "plain and simple". Again, it depends on usage. If someone uses 2 GB in Latin America that's $30  under Open World. Under the new Global Roaming it's $25. So in that scenario how is that a price hike?

Because calls are no longer free.

Also, it is $25 per WEEK. The $30 was for the entire month.

If you use 1GB over the course of a month, it would now be $100, vs $0 before.

That's a massive price hike.

It's impossible to please all of the people all of the time.

Incorrect. It's called offering options. Which Sprint has done for years with the Open World OR Global Roaming Plan.

For Latin America, this is a price hike, plain and simple.

WTF This is a huge downgrade for Latin America which was 1GB free with 3G speed.

Im happy for T-mobile. The more pressure on Verizon and AT&T the better

Or they are bragging that you get free AAA membership with Sprint service.

Wait, really?

Yup. The website is totally unusable. It makes you sign on multiple times when navigating between sections. It's a jumble of an unreadable new interface and a readable (but stale) old interface. There are many sections which have out of date or flat out wrong information.

 

In fact, if you look at the new interface, you can see the old interface lurking behind it when loading. It's a sad state of affairs.

Yes I noticed that! It loads the old interface and a second later the new one pops on top. I've never seen that anywhere before!

It's called maintenance and most websites go through it at some point.

 

Sent from my 2PS64 using Tapatalk

Maintenance is "sorry the website will be down from 1am to 4am"

This is a horrible mess.

I finally got to where I wanted to...services. Took 2 extra screens to reach and the page itself is in the old format.

Who updates a website page by page?

WTF have they done to the website. It has gone from bad to an unusable mess. It just had me sign on 3 times, it flickered back and forth between the old and the new inter phase, I was forced to enter an 8 digit code twice, and now apparently 15 days into my cycle Ive sued 0GB, 0 minutes, and 0 texts.

If we're thinking about the same spreadsheet then it clearly shows that Unlimited Freedom is cheaper than ED1500.

 

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

Read the comments. The spreadsheet is not correct.

I have an ED plan. I have done the math myself an used the online optimizer. If I switch within Sprint my price goes up. If I were to switch to Tmobile, my price would go down.

So Sprint did nothing for ED subscribers right?

The online optimizer shows a price hike for me... and thats before we start adding phone costs