JeffDTD

So you were hoping to turn your last 12 month upgrade into a 10? Make sprint replace your device if its mechanically malfunctioning and sell it... the resale value of the wimax devices is going to decline as more and more customers become aware of lte

The Galaxy series are (so far) the only two phones (have carried both epics) that have not failed on me due to quality control issues . I love love love HTC..... but don't have any desire to deal with light leaking, failed charger ports, etc that I dealt with in my HTC Windows Mobile years... I use to have to depend on insurance to keep a functioning device. Had 4 palm pre replacements in between.... I'm 1 year 6 months of no insurance with Samsung.. I may not hold as good of a signal in a fringe area and I may not get a GPS lock as quickly as another phone would, but these guys have survived plenty of drops and haven't done anything that a reset or wipe can't fix. So.... I want to again carry an HTC device, but I'd want to pick it up 2nd hand or hear of very few random quality issues.... ANYWAY, I'm very very excited about being able to wirelessly charge again like with the Pre .... loving the colors ..... excited about the improved battery.... and loving the software. Really interested to read how successful they've been in upping the voice interaction... If well, Apple is going to be even more furious!

I love it! less competition leads to... wait for it... LOWER PRICES! Yeeeahhaaaaaaww!!!!!!!!! I've always wondered... had Ma' Bell not been broken up back in the 80's, where would we be today? Would she have eaten more communication companies and made the opportunities for new players to enter the market even slimmer? Who knows. What I do know is that as a child, I can remember my grandmother having a job that required her to be tethered to her home telephone and I remember her seeing landline bills as high as $275 in one month... I also remember later on, when we were finally able to buy rate plans that included the entire state or entire regions as being in your "local" calling area, the prices dropped sharply and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Now granny has a Sprint "Home Phone Connect" that I pay for and for $19.99 + tax, she gets nationwide unlimited calling... (she doesn't quite understand -how- it works.. but she loves it) You could argue... The proliferation of mobile calling brought the cost of landline down... the proliferation of text messaging brought the cost of mobile calling down... the proliferation of mobile data usage brought the cost of the prior three down even farther..... Our communication costs seem to decrease when competitiveness allows people to adopt "the next big thing"..... ATT was ready to pay 36 billion to buy the rights to more customers and spend a ton of money building out a new network... and because it had to keep 32 billion of that in its pocket, they have to raise prices? Consumers "will suffer"? Sprint ran some ads , if i recall, pointing the finger at ATT for "raising data rates by 30%"... I thought it was a little off because while they upped the cost, they also upped the bucket from 2GB to 3GB, meaning that a user who typically uses between 2GB and 3GB (i believe this is closer to their data centric customer average than they'll admit) gets a $5 discount. Oh well. Bring on the flames, Mr. Stevenson. Point your fingers at President Obama, the FCC, the big nasty corporate machine that regulates the public airwaves you use... because as big and nasty as you swear them to be, your company is just as bureaucratic , confused, and pig steered as you could ever argue the government to be. Didn't he recently take a pay cut? It must really cause his guts to churn every time he looks at the picture of that mazerati he was planning to buy with the pay increase he was hoping for only to find out he had to take a $2 million dorrar pay cut. It must really make his blood boil to only be bringing in 22 million a year... there was certainly a golden egg waiting for him if he had gotten the merger approved. I believe ATT actually envisioned building a high speed LTE network that would be pristine but slowly and surely raising the prices on it to the point that customers would actually want to remain on lower priced 3G only alternatives, staving off galvanization of the current price points by the newer tech. I think they're more concerned with minimizing technology advancement and minimizing competition than anything else. If it weren't for sprint, they wouldn't have even had anyone asking for Anymobile Anytime.

Mad Max

Cocktail dress

Hate to ask such a simple question, but is the airrave an option? If you dont have a home isp, guess it wouldnt be.

Forgot to mention... my apartment was also full of fluorescent commercial style lighting... always seemed like the closer you were to them, the worse the chances you got a signal

I use to live in a complex that was dead center of an "excellent" sprint signal area and less than a mile from a tower .... outside it was in the -80's, inside it was only usable next to the windows. I never could explain it, considering restaurants and buildings all around me got a signal fine while indoors.

Happy ending

Great network vision news... I'm eager to hear if anything is said in the conference call about LTE roaming/network sharing. I did notice that Churn on Sprint postpaid went up very slightly; the change is negligible, but more notable when you consider the churn on prepaid has consistently declined. You could probably attribute some of the postpaid movement to the changes in discounts/free contract terminations, but I think the take away is that "customer satisfaction with prepaid" continues to grow. Some of that has to be handset offerings, but I also consider prepaid to be a great measure of the "standalone" performance of the native sprint network. Would argue this means the network is performing very well for many. Would also argue that Sprint's legacy network is a great product and if maintained, remains something of value that is very marketable at the right price. If I were an investor, I would definitely be asking about their plans for mobilization of the 5.4 million postpaid and prepaid remaining nextel customers... For 1.5 million of them on prepaid, I would think they might just budget price some nice CDMA offerings, but for the rest.... if the current rate of conversion continues, 2013 has the potential to put sprint back in the 53-54 million customer range, granted the rate of growth is perpetuated.

No, only for unlocked devices. Not sprint's version.

Agree!!

I don't think this was ever about Sprint being able to "keep taxes low for customers" If that were important, they wouldn't have ever tacked on those "Admin fees" that we all get. I'd think the discrepancy is more-so in how much of those taxes collected they turn over to the state. I think I'd rather them collect the maximum allowed tax on the plan (thus avoiding lawsuits) and can the admin fees that line their pockets. But oh well. Its a little disgraceful to me that an employee or someone with access to internal emails chose to keep emails and take them to the state. Its quite possible that sprint could argue those emails are not permissible evidence based on how they were obtained. Of course, considering the anti-big business attitude that is permeating through our society today and in the courts, its likely the judge will allow them on face value alone. If the state issued a clarifying memo in 2002, it would be valuable to revisit the memo with direct reference to the "wireless ecosystem" in 2002. At that time, text messaging had NOT been embraced by the general public at excess. Most of us had minute plans that included a few messages and didn't charge for them incoming, etc. Vision plans (internet) were available , but they also USED MINUTES ON YOUR PLAN, so, the minute bucket itself's usage itself would allot for talk and data while they could argue most customers did not subscribe to text in 2002. Sprint's interpretation of the law would have worked for them in 2002. So, if the memo was issued in 2002, considering the wireless environment, what was the state's actual intent at the time? And are the other carriers collecting and paying taxes for data plans and messaging plans today?

The only true impact has been a steady reduction in the overall value of the combined entity and the simultaneous dilution of shareholder value. The only money thats gone up in smoke is the affiliate buyouts and payments for debt gained. The idea that sprint would have survived alone is naive. While an alltel merger would have helped spectrum in some places, it would not have bolstered sprints heavyweight status the way that nextel did. Sprint would have needed to be acquired or buy again.... and nextel would have been another carrier's target.

This is kind of a break in the convo....but it irritates the stew out of me that the big two are poor mouthing about an approaching " spectrum crisis" but as soon as verizon scored this deal agreement, you hear of plans to increase mobile video/media options, more wired isp replacement, etc. Is it a "crunch" as much as it is a lack of expansion desires and capacity not exponentially matching?

I dont remember anyone complaining about this until the giant 3G/footprint whore off that verizon and att had a few years ago, when att finally settled in saying " the network that allows you to talk -and- text in more places" bla bla bla. If 100 people value the feature, id imagine that about 10 of them have a real world opportunity to benefit from it while the other 90 have had their mind made up since they saw the att commercial where the guy " made reservations for his girls bday while she reminded him about her bday" .... and thought to themselves " that could be me"

Exactly. Outright ownership of Clear's spectrum would preclude Sprint from ever being able to jump on the "spectrum crisis" bandwagon that ATT and Verizon are whining about. All the whining and padding of Senator's pockets (John Kerry is now a Lightsquared fan?) will eventually pay off for them. I don't want Sprint to be stuck out on an island with its "new spectrum" being cost prohibitive to expand with.

If your goal is ISP replacement, sprint isnt your best option. They also arent marketing themselves to be a sufficient ISP replacement. If a gsm provider has hspa+ deployed there, that will likely be your most cost effective way to avoid an ISP monthly bill with wireless, even if its a few extra bucks over sprint. The premiums paid on sprints competitors, if your usage is indeed low, is still cheaper than an ISP bill. There may also be low speed broadband available for less tha $20 a month, depending on your location

I remember that swiftel and sprint's disagreement that caused the 4g phone embargo was supposedly that swiftel expected sprint to foot the 4g cost for upgrade. Given that they pay sprint somewhat of a "rent" for customer care, etc, its easy to see why a cash strapped entity would act that way. There were rumblings in 2009 that swiftel had agreed to be sold to another company (not wireless) but that the deal fell through and they renewed with sprint through 2018. So, while its probably possible for a complete buyout to happen, I wouldnt expect them to be able to fire sprint and take up verizon. Oh well... id think sprints interest in helping the affiliates will be on a back burner until 2014..

No new towers in dirty old Mississippi, but it was nice to see that they're again planning to make their rounds to the towers in the city that get so much traffic and upgrade backhaul/ capacity. That's certainly new and a welcome thing. The speeds around my area are usually pretty good after the initial round of upgrades last year, but future proofing is always welcome

Other threads have said that it capitalizes on the efficiency of 1x advanced... so, would expect that your phone is defaulted to only use it when it recognizes you connected via cdma 1x advanced ... a call initiated in 1xA to another party would be subject to any of the various compression standards the receiver may be using.. I would think the sprint users clarity would be high, but that probably depends on the phones settings ( whether or not it goes HD with 1xa on its end, or requires the receiver to also be 1xa). The press release says it has to be evo to evo, so we should assume the latter for now. Have also read here that 1xa 's default compression will be more similar to att and verizon than we are now.