Fraydog

I guess someone hasn't seen the AT&T Facebook page.

All carriers have their issues, but if you look hard at what Sprint is doing, that once they get their current network rebuild done, that they'll be fine. Sprint PR can handle all this better though, a nice "Pardon Our Dust" page explaining Network Vision would be a nice start.

 

You don't like them because they're French. Admit it. Sacre bleu!!!

 

Robert via Nexus 7 with Tapatalk HD

LOL. They're only half-French. The Alcatel part of the company is not really the issue. The part of the company that used to be a part of AT&T is the problem. I'm at least part French in descent so I can't hate the French. Not my fault they can't win a war though.

My theory on NYC having issues can be summed up in two words: Alcatel-Lucent.

I don't think they're a good network builder. I just don't. Maybe it's instinctive and speculative on my part to think that but I really don't care. I wish NSN was the third supplier of Network Vision. The things they are doing are way ahead of everyone except Ericsson, and Samsung isn't far behind. I am not a big fan of how AL handled their end.

If you like Sprint, be mad at how AL is trying to toss Sprint under the bus for giving them beaucoup dollars for building 1/3 of their networks. I wish Sprint would just kick them out and let NSN and Ericsson finish the job.

Those T-Mobile prices are very high considering having to pay full price for phones, plus the overage fees.

The plans revealed today are the subsidy plans for national retailers who don't support EIP. Phones will be cheaper because Costco and the other national retailers still use the subsidy model and the phones will be cheaper upfront.

Um, I think AJ was being sarcastic... I think...

Was anyone at the Sprint event in Manhattan?

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/03/14/sprint-samsung-galaxy-s-4-statement/

Sprint has made their announcement that they're carrying the GS4, to the shock of absolutely no one.

Qaulcaumm LTE patent shenanigans =\

Or AT&T and Verizon running interference. I'm trying to find out if the US version supports pentaband HSPA+. If it doesn't, maybe the FCC needs to be involved to a much greater degree.

I wasted an hour of my life watching that crap.

Honestly, I think the HTC One is a better device considering what the One brings to the table and Samsung taking Apple's iterative approach to updates of devices now.

Even AT&T's buildouts near where I live (St. Louis Metro) hit higher cell densities than VZW. Some of the rural places around me are getting LTE, which is nice. That has to be tempered by the slower speeds in the more congested places in the network. VZW is the coverage king where I live, no question, but Alltel (what's left of it) is pretty good, and all things considered, not enough people use them.

In places where everybody uses VZW, and they don't have LTE, like Chester, peak speeds on EV-DO are running at levels not better than EDGE. In Carbondale, where VZW has had LTE for nearly two years, LTE is running at 5-7 Mbps, which is about the same speeds that AT&T gets there on HSPA+, and EV-DO is nearly unusable.

I suspect VZW is deploying sites here to make their LTE footprint look larger for marketing reasons. Even the author conceded that Verizon Wireless's device locking policies, cost structure, and customer policies might be bad. Well, no s***. I could have also mentioned Verizon's only deploying 5000 AWS sites this year. What we don't know is how much extra deployment of 700 that VZW on EV-DO only sites in LTE areas VZW will do. Too bad none of the Fierce Wireless shills thought of asking Nikki Palmer that.

http://www.beatriceco.com/bti/porticus/bell/bell_system_property.html

Here's a walk down memory lane, when the old Bell monopoly owned most of the phones connected to the system. In fact, there was a long time it was against their rules to connect a phone to the system without Bell Approval.

The Motley Fool are a bunch of idiots.

Enough said there.

None are really needed. The town sits on a bluff.

It would be nice to see STL get something online, even if it was the Lumiere site getting lit up with LTE.

Including ours.

I want to make it clear that I can sign up for Sprint in my area code. I would just likely get golden ticketed out of Sprint in 3-4 months for going over the 300 MB cap.

And you'll be the kid that falls in the chocolate river and doesn't come back.

Since the river front is the only place that consistently gets native signal, that explains exactly why I watch Sprint from afar and not as a customer.

Someone want the golden ticket?

Where I live, I could get the golden ticket without even having to go to the trouble of putting 00001 on my phone.

Ha, I wish STL would have been a lot faster along. At this rate, Sprint will be the last of the Big 4 to cover STL in LTE.

Verizon was there as a launch market late in 2010 before LTE phones were even available.

AT&T got there in April 2012.

T-Mobile? Who knows, but they're much farther along on modernization and 1900 refarming than the few sites in see in progress in STL. I'd give a cell count but airportal.de is down.

That depends on where you live.

In the cities, VoLTE will be a better tech. In rural areas, I wouldn't be running so quick to dump GSM, WCDMA/HSPA+, or CDMA1X/EV-DO. It's going to be a while, probably in 3GPP Release 12, before some of the problems with LTE propagation and call handoffs get solved.

For the last picture, I'm guessing that with the purple triangle and TMA's, that it's a T-Mobile site they have not yet refarmed.

I don't know who is doing the refarming for T-Mobile in Texas, whether it's Nokia Siemens or Ericcson. If it's Ericsson, they'd put Antenna Integrated Radio's on the top of the tower, if it's NSN, they'd go with a more convoluted setup of Flexi's and RRU's.

http://www.getthecelloutatl.com

This might be my new favorite poster child website to sum up NIMBY-ism.

Do these people realize that T-Mobile is eventually going to put up small cells that push out much less RF and that they won't be able to stop those small cells from happening because by the time they notice, they'll be operational?

While we're on this topic, let's remember that Sprint introduced HD Voice with EVRC-NW in May 2012, saying that it was going to be introduced later that year on the Sprint platform. So far, to my knowledge, EVRC-NW hasn't been enabled yet. The performer in the US mobile market that will get to claim they were first to VoLTE is MetroPCS, and the first to HD Voice is T-Mobile's implementation of AMR-WB over UMTS circuit switched voice channels. Metro's current VoLTE implementation is encoded as AMR-NB, but Roger Lindquist, CEO of MetroPCS has said that voice quality was "better than what we have over the CDMA network."

http://www.fiercebroadbandwireless.com/story/gsma-planning-volte-how-guide-carriers/2013-03-03

I think one thing we can all agree on is that Sprint is nowhere near pushing for VoLTE. They have to finish Network Vision first. I'd just like to know what the hang up with EVRC-NW is.

If I turn up any old handsets during Spring Cleaning, I'll check.

 

Here is a quick question: are you certain that Cellular 850 MHz carriers in Southern Illinois are no longer running any AMPS?

 

AJ

I'd have to contact the Verizon engineers I know. I have no such contacts within ATNI.

If I had to make a guess I'd say no.

 

That would bump up against DTV channel 14 at 470 MHz -- the best UHF channel. Broadcasters would go berserk. It would be the DTV channel 51 and Lower 700 MHz A block issue, but worse. Not gonna happen.

 

AJ

Looks like I forgot to add "broadcasters" to my list. Duly noted.

They're part of the problem too.

The Bells are a big part of the Channel 51 mess as well. Anything to stamp out competition.

Cellular 850 still isn't universal for rural coverage. Clearing out the 450 band would be the ideal here.

Southern Illinois lost coverage after the transition from analog to CDMA. I don't expect anything different from CDMA to VoLTE.

I agree with the basic point you make AJ, but I have little faith in our regulators to do the right thing. As such, I bet on failure. There are common sense solutions that can work. I just don't expect the FCC, or the 3GPP, or Qualcomm, to see them though Bell lobbying.

Out of all three groups you'd probably have the best luck with the 3GPP. That's a sad, sad commentary. It is the truth.