bitbang3r

Oh... there's *plenty* of room in Sprint's 800Mhz spectrum for W-CDMA... or at least, there WILL be, after T-Mobile makes Sprint gamble it all on the merger, the feds shoot it down, and T-Mobile walks away with it. :-D Don't feel too bad for Sprint, though... whatever they lose, Softbank will just turn around and replace with new 600Mhz spectrum anyway. Food for thought: the only country on earth whose mobile phone market is more restricted, locked down, gimped, proprietary, and basically run in ways that make AT&T and Verizon look like poster children for open hardware and Cyanogen is... Japan. Nintendo -- the most dominant videogame company on earth just a couple of years ago -- was blinded by its messed-up home market and concluded that phones were a hopeless lost cause. Sony was, too... until it bought Ericsson. Softbank wants to replicate its "success" in the US. Imagine, for a moment, if Sprint were in charge of T-Mobile and got to dictate policy going forward during a transition... and did something completely evil, like disabling new, non-grandfathered T-Mobile SIM cards from working in non-T-Mobile-branded phones (whose ESN wasn't in Sprint's database). A Sprint-Tmobile merger would be a tragedy because it would eliminate the only lifeboat to semi-freedom we *have* in the United States. And that's precisely why the feds will find a way to shoot down the merger. T-Mobile has done a great job of casting itself as the white knight who's here to save Americans from being exploited by Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon. The feds won't care whether or not a larger Sprint would be "more competitive" with AT&T and Verizon... it's going to care whether a Sprint-owned T-Mobile will still be "kind of unofficially non-blatantly-evil". There's another reason why I believe the merger will never happen, even if the feds won't stop it: Google. T-Mobile has been Google's favorite bully pulpit since day one. It's been the one American network where Google has never had to kneel before anyone and play "Mother, May I?" I firmly believe that if push came to shove, Google will show up at the last minute and buy T-Mobile just to keep it from being swallowed by Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T. It'll buy it just to make sure it never has to beg for permission to do anything. As far as 1xRTT is concerned, 1xRTT will be the LAST legacy service Sprint shuts down. 1xRTT will be available for YEARS after the last site with EVDO repurposes its spectrum. When it comes to wide open rural areas that occasionally have an influx of tourists, 1xRTT has some real advantages over W-CDMA (mainly, it can accommodate more simultaneous users in narrower channels, instead of just a few users splattering high-powered noise across huge chunks of the band). Two dozen W-CDMA users with directional antennas & high-power picocells can't hear each other's uplinks, but the tower can hear them all stomping on each other. 1xRTT is a convenient way to separate them by space into smaller chunks of spectrum than W-CDMA would allow.

I'm really surprised that Google made different Galaxy Nexi for CDMA & GSM, and for LTE & no-LTE, instead of just using a chipset that can do everything like the MDM6600 & connecting a LTE daughtercard to the phones destined for networks where it mattered. Even if the phones cost more to manufacture, it would have saved Google (and the carriers themselves) money by letting them dump unsold inventory to someone like MetroPCS (or a regional carrier in India, or Russia, or New Zealand) by selling the phones for half price with the requirement that they be reflashed and repackaged with new battery back covers (or sold to companies like Assurion for use as replacement spares). If the only difference between an AT&T GNex and a Sprint GNex were the ROM image flashed to it and the logo on the battery back, they'd all be in less danger of ending up with unsold inventory that had to be disposed of for pennies on the dollar at the end of its life because SOMEONE would probably still be willing to buy them by the shipping crate for half off.

Well, it looks like they're actively working on things again today. I did some major testing near the intersection of Pines Boulevard & Flamingo Road (Pembroke Pines), near the Pembroke Pines police/fire department (which appears to be the mother-of-all local Sprint towers, ringed by round Clear wimax antennas pointing equally in every direction), and near Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport (FXE), by Commercial Blvd & Prospect. For all intents and purposes, Flamingo-Pines had no meaningful EVDO service around 9am. It sputtered to life every few minutes, but a phone without wimax would have had basically no data service at that location this morning. The Pembroke Pines fire/police tower seemed almost as bad, but literally 30 seconds before I was about to drive away and head to work, I got about a minute of pure nirvana... ~1800kbps down, roughly the same up. Then it deteriorated down to ~800kbps both ways, and stayed there for a few minutes. I did some more random tests along the Turnpike, 595, and 95 between Pines Blvd. and Commercial Blvd, but EVDO appeared to be mostly dead until I got to Broward Blvd, at which point it surged without warning back up to ~600-800kbps down before collapsing again just north of Oakland Park Blvd. The area by FXE off Commercial is like Pines-Flamingo... basically no functioning EVDO service as of around 10am. In fact, something in the phone's network stack apparently crashed so badly between the time I got off I-95 at Commercial & got to my office by FXE, I couldn't even connect to WI-FI at the office without rebooting. I've noticed that Android phones definitely seem to have a real problem dealing with scenarios where there's solid RF-connectivity, but poor/no backhaul connectivity (it appears many things just check to see whether the network is "up", without testing to see whether it actually "works", and fail catastrophically when it ends up in a state of having solid "local-loop" wireless connectivity, but can't reliably reach the internet itself). Were it not for the knowledge that Sprint is actively working on their network upgrades right this minute, I'd be fuming... but since they are, it's more like schadenfreude and morbid curiosity ;-)

Well, I'm sure glad to see this, because it might explain why Sprint has been so completely dysfunctional for the past few days. I just drove to Orlando & back yesterday and today along the Turnpike, and was seeing 40-60kbps down and 400-600kbps up most of the way (not a typo). Yeah, after it became obvious that I couldn't even sustain a useful connection to Pandora, I spent the rest of the trip (with wimax and wi-fi disabled to prevent thrashing) running Speedtest over and over all the way home. I'd say about 50-60% of the tests were about 200-250kbps down and 400-600kbps up, about 30% were 40-60kbps down and 400-600kbps up, about 10% (mostly Palm Beach county) failed at some point, and 4 or 5 spots threw me freakishly-fast EVDO results out of (seemingly) nowhere... like, 800-1500kbps down, and similar up (in fact, they were the only instance where uploads weren't 3-10 times faster than downloads). For anyone who's curious, the "freakishly-fast" spots were approximately: West Palm Beach near Southern Blvd (on Tpk) Somewhere around northern Boca (on Tpk) Eastern Coral Springs (several miles outside the current 4G wimax footprint), on Sawgrass Near Oakland Park Blvd on Sawgrass Just south of Sunrise Blvd. on Sawgrass, heading into the big interchange. Near Royal Palm Blvd. on 75 east of Weston. Pembroke Pines, however, seems to be almost as bad of a mess tonight as Palm Beach County was. Wimax works flawlessly in my driveway and inside my house, but 3G can barely even finish Speedtest half the time, and is limping along at 40-60 down/400-600 up the rest of the time (I'm by the mall, in solid 4G wimax territory). I didn't get aggressive about speedtest until tonight, but for a real-world example from yesterday, I bought two songs from Amazon mp3 shortly after getting on the Turnpike from Sawgrass. I was north of Port St. Lucie -- almost an hour later -- before they finished downloading... and I was actively "nursing them along" and cracking the whip behind Amazon to keep it trying over and over the whole time. The local dysfunctionality of Sprint in South Florida was even more painfully obvious compared to how well Sprint worked once I was north of Kissimmee -- I had 4G (wimax) even in areas that looked about as urban as US-27 near I-75. I was starting to get seriously worried before I saw this thread, and was starting to think that Sprint had just abandoned us to entropy -- not wanting to spend any money fixing something they were going to rip out and replace in a couple of months, and leaving their data network here to progressively deteriorate and fall apart in the meantime.