Fraydog

I can easily see some areas with the two lower 5mhz channels being slammed packed. Hell even in my low percentage of Sprint users, they fired up a site and within 2 days the site was unusable from Monday thru Friday 9-4. Forcing your phone to 1x is about the only answer for any data as the other 3 EVDO carriers are useless as well.

 

So in this instance, the iPhone users will have a dead phone. Others will be streaming along. The dumb customer will just say.. "Apple sucks.. Piece of junk." after looking at their friend's phone.

 

So maybe it's a good thing.. Kinda like how Sprint sets it up for Android users to use 800smr 1x quite a bit and Apple users to only use it when only absolutely necessary.

Two points.

1. With the others buying new phones using 2600 how much load will there be?  The ones having 1900 only LTE phones will be the ones stuck if overloading happens first, at least the Apple users will have 800 LTE going. 

2. We know who gets blamed... when Verizon and AT&T (and now T-Mobile users in large cities with LTE) users cruising along, if Sprint iPhone users have trouble, Sprint is going to get blamed. That's how it goes down. 

I'm not panicking about this at all, mainly because I think SoftBank knows how to deal while the Old Sprint Nextel didn't. It's just going to take time for investment to be put down and perceptions to change.

Think you are missing the point really. Goes both ways... when PCS is slammed and so is 800 and data basically doesn't work. 2600 is there to save the day. If all the new phones were triband including the Iphone5x then maybe the other bands could offload some of that data to users in 2600 range. Regardless it's just bad for everyone all around since these phones will be around for a while.

Even still, you have the rest of the Sprint smartphones that will pick up TD-LTE. How much bad will be left on the 800/1900 bands? I don't see it.  Also remember that SoftBank already has experience managing this sort of traffic in Japan with their 900/2600 based LTE network there. 

Under Sprint, I would have said that the lock-in of CDMA would be too tempting to not retain as long as possible.

Under SoftBank, I think that they'd be winning to experiment with changing that policy so CDMA SIM authentication is possible. 

The iPhone has way more LTE bands than any other LTE smartphone I can think of, but TD-LTE 41 didn't make the cut. I'm surprised because of both Sprint and SoftBank holding 41. Then again, Apple probably didn't know for sure if SoftBank would complete the Sprint acquisition when it was time to make a call on this. I don't think there's going to be that much TD-LTE anyway. 

Like the usual, if the e-penis is your cup of tea, you should look at buying a non-Apple product.

I'm sure the GM seed will be leaking to the other parts of the Internet soon. 

I think we all know a lot of the SRA territory is going away. I'm surprised anyone is still surprised about reductions.  

He lives!  He lives!!!   :kisswink:

 

Robert

I apologize for taking a long break. I was really burnt out. 

It ended up being a long summer break for me to work on my golf game and lower my handicap. I was off all social media (even Twitter) for a long time. 

The Bells only succeeded in part because of the regulatory advantages they had. They still had to build out in a lot of places. Not all of it was bought. The other factor was Sprint's extreme incompetence through the Nextel debacle and T-Mobile's passiveness in upgrading their own networks. It wasn't the duopoly alone.

I'm sure if there were any pro-business people on here, they'd point at Sprint and T-Mo US dropping the ball. I think the current leadership at both companies is better but they're still behind.

The alternatives aren't that great, unfortunately. Alcatel-Lucent has been doing very poorly in keeping up in wireless. It has been largely the CDMA business with rural/regional operators in the US has been keeping the wireless business afloat and Alcatel-Lucent is expected to shut it down or divest it (to a company that's not likely to be considered approved for the US market) in the next 6-12 months in favor of becoming a wireline/data center/backbone network specialist. That's why T-Mobile is replacing all legacy Lucent and Alcatel-Lucent gear in its network with Nokia's gear. Huawei would not be permitted. ZTE would require significant wrangling that isn't worth the effort. No other vendors exist in this market. Most of them are dead or merged.

 

The potential shut-down of the Alcatel-Lucent wireless business does not bode well. Of course, ALU's gear is the least advanced of the three vendors in Network Vision, which is why Sprint gave them the smallest physical footprint. However, this is going to screw over the entire rural/regional operator community, because nearly all of them depend exclusively on Alcatel-Lucent.

If AlLu gets sold or shut down that would hurt the entire US mobile industry except for T-Mobile. Verizon in particular would be hurt. AT&T also uses Alcatel-Lucent a lot, although their lead LTE vendor is Ericsson while Verizon's is AlLu. Sprint actually has less exposure to AlLu troubles than the duopoly.

Did they hire people to take down nextel stuff?

Yes. Here's a video of a Nextel site removal from YouTube.

In this case, Dimola Bros. out of NYC is one of the contractors Sprint has hired to remove old Nextel iDEN sites.

"My friends" is completely anecdotal.

In reality, the focus on market share is too great and not enough focus is on total unit share and profit share.

Apple's total unit share is still growing, albeit not as fast as Android's.

June 29-30 was the shutoff date

 

Guess what the equipment is still on all of the towers in Maui i know this because every day i drive through a road where theres a huge tower and i saw back long long time ago them installing nextel on the second sector right under clearwire.

 

till this day/moment those panels are still there and are present on other towers too.

 

does sprint have like a killswitch or something when they 'killed' it

All the Nextel equipment is shut down permanently. Not all removal of said equipment has yet occurred, however. That should all be gone by the end of the year, IIRC.

That doesn't prove there is no area in a given city that lacks TMO coverage. It merely proves that in at least a few places, TMO doesn't lack coverage.

 

The major gripe with TMO on this thread is they have no (public) plans to upgrade their 14-15k rural towers. Somewhere in here is quoted TMO execs staying that only 37k of their towers - current 3g/4g footprint - will be upgraded to LTE. TMO has 228 million HSPA+

http://www.tmonews.com/2013/07/t-mobile-announces-huge-lte-expansion-116-markets-and-157-million-people/

 

They had 225mil HSPA+ 4 months ago

http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251624&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1809846&highlight=

so I guess they're making good progress. In another year, they may have 237mil LTE.

 

 

 

No one is faulting them for their lack of 300mil coverage but they should at least upgrade the 14k towers that are currently only EDGE.

 

If they'd upgrade all 52k with LTE, they'd probably have 250mil LTE.

Have you looked at their coverage map, zoomed in enough so you can see 2G vs 3G/4g? The 2g area is ginormous. If they'd upgrade all towers to LTE, all that would be LTE.

I think T-Mobile's current plan to build LTE from the inside of their footprint out is quite solid. It is pointless, at this stage, to build out rural sites solely for HSPA+. I'd much rather they do one set of upgrades in rural areas once they have their HSPA+ footprint fully LTE, and just jump from EDGE to LTE. T-Mobile can do the physical labor in one fell swoop, refarm spectrum, launch HSPA+ then LTE. It makes much more sense to do the upgrades that way at this point. I'd like to see T-Mobile get all their native done by the end of 2014, ideally, the key is if DT thinks it is feasible to do this. Once T-Mobile has LTE over their current native footprint, they can survey if/where expansion opportunities exist, and be in position for any 600 MHz spectrum opportunities out there.

There's still some remote cities where clicking pops up 3G, indicating it's below HSPA+21.

What does it take to go from H+: 7.2, 14.4, 21?

 

Is it a pure software update?

That usually has more to do with backhaul.

Qualcomm usually wins those battles with the FCC. See past history as a guide.

I can only hope that Sprint's Plan B is the T-Mobile FDD plan. Of all the plans I would prefer that over Sprint's.

Sprint's Everything Referral Plus Plans are back on the Sprint.com/sero website. They are show next to the new All My way plans.

 

I guess the whole " the sky is falling" was for nothing.

I'd rather see Sprint chop up what's left of SERO for better non-contract plans as an option other than the All In plans that Sprint has just unveiled.

I wish Sprint would move in the direction of having a new Premier plan that could offer people the choice of either being on contract like AT&T's and Verizon's contract options and T-Mobile's non-contract options.

For all we know this could be SoftBank's plan. They haven't even been in the US market for more than a week, I'm eager to see what their game plan with Sprint is.

Will the Detroit Tigers win the World Series?

 

 

AJ

If they do I'm obviously pulling this out of the archive. If my Cardinals don't make it to the World Series and the Tigers do, I know who to pull for now.

Call quality going from CDMA to GSM is always going to suck until we have upgraded from that to LTE to UMTS or LTE to LTE HD Voice with PCM carrier interconnect. 

NSFW... how not to do a cell site video. Dumbass deserved the RF burn. 

It will be interesting to see what AT&T does with the old ATNI areas when it takes them over. There's still a skeleton of a GSM network running here from the First Cellular days primarily used as a roamer for AT&T. 

It's brass balled for John to defend T-Mobile like that, and no doubt, they've moved faster than I thought they would on LTE. That said, it's time to get some upgrades to rural areas.  I have nothing against T-Mobile, and in cities they've improved 100%, but their rural network is still hot garbage. 

Otosan is on his way.

Maybe Jamal Daniel will let Joan Lappin have a sympathy lay. 

Sorry that's all I got for witty remarks guys. 

Break out the Kool and the Gang.

Excuse me while I troll Joan Lappin.