Fraydog

I know a friend turned down a buyout to get on an iPhone 4S up there. I told him to hold off until LTE. From the way I saw it, WiMax was a dead end, he didn't even use it on his Nexus S, and 3G is freaking overloaded in Chicago. Funny his phone worked fine in Carbondale while Verizon 3G failed on SIU graduation weekend. I just hope the 1 LTE carrier is enough up there, as AT&T is going to probably land 700 Lower B and Verizon will gain another 10x10 in SpectrumCo. Sprint has a lot riding on Chicago.

Read the Chicago articles on the main page. It's not a "slight the city" thing, it has to do with the engineering of the project that Samsung and Ericsson is doing. They have to get the suburban and rural sites online first. The transition in the city will be smoother, however.

Also, apparently, Mobilenation was originally SI Wireless and is owned by local telephone co-op's here that are all based in Southern Illinois. Yet, they punted on serving their own territory. I'm going to have to do a LOT more homework investigating all of this.

I know a few around me. Carbondale, IL has a protection site. I know some Sprint customers there that have connected with the site in question (which is a real small pocket of downtown Carbondale).

Isn't there an ignore function on here? That's what I use on boards where I just don't want to read someone's posts.

I seem to remember them both having issues. Nextel was definitely headed off a cliff even before the Sprint merger, so I agree with the basic premise. It's still hard to me not to lay the ultimate blame at Forsee's feet. He should have seen all that coming down the pike.

The reasons for sticking around were gone. If they never cared for Sprint and chose Nextel over Sprint, doubly so. Ultimately this is on Gary Forsee for bungling the Nextel merger. The plans are different now, and thankfully much better. I just get tired of hearing them get blamed when they aren't the real reason Sprint had issues. Sprint's issues were deep even before Nextel came in the picture. I think VoLTE and Rich Communications Services are a really solid, compelling route to keep current iDEN people on board. Sprint should seek to keep those people on board. They can still bring big ARPU, especially considering that if they stuck with Nextel this long, they will be loyal to Sprint as well. Most of the malcontents you mention already left for other carriers.

On SalukiTalk, where I used to post frequently, we called the temporary bans the "Penalty Box." On the front page, the Penalty Box section showed who was in the box and the length of time they were there for.

If Apple wasn't cutthroat, someone would cut theirs. Look at the history of Microsoft. Apple wants to avoid a repeat of that. This is, I believe, the root cause of the patent insanity. Yet for all that they still contribute a lot of innovation to the table. I still would buy their laptops over anything else, simply because I don't see anyone coming close to them in that arena. Look at the new Retina MacBook Pro. Who else would make that laptop? No one.

The entitlement of this. There's a carrier that will let you tether all you want with shared data now, it's called Verizon. If you want tethering that bad, go there. Also, most European carriers never had unlimited. That's simply a terrible comparison you just made.

They seem ridiculous on face value. I calculated it for my family plan, however, and came up with a different result. The Share Everything with 6GB data for two iPhones calculated to the same price as the legacy plan for two iPhones with unlimited data we are on. Current plan: 700 shared minutes and unlimited messages = $80. Access fee for each line = $20 Two unlimited data plans = $60 Total = $160 Share Everything: Two smartphone access fees with unlimited voice and data = $80 6 GB of unlimited data = $80 Total = $160 Cutting to the 4GB plan saves me $10. It isn't as bad as I thought. It's certainly not the type of plan that would make me run from Verizon. Then again, Verizon plans were ridiculous to begin with.

It sounds like Samsung didn't bother to add EVRC-NW support in TouchWiz. Still, I wonder if some intrepid hackers could enable Service Option 73.

Excellent point, one I did not consider until now. I have come to the line of thinking that any pre-NV site expansion here would have not worked well. If Sprint decides to come at some future point once 800 LTE is in play and use the tower T-Mobile built, they'd have enough coverage to blanket Chester. The T-Mobile tower, which is at the highest point of the county, is now owned by SBA. I'm sure SBA will want other companies to lease from them other than T-Mobile.

Sprint's pre NV network is held together by a few strands of copper as it is, I think tethering hurts that even more.

Well, thanks for the research, it can still help in the future. I think local government has been a thorn here. That might play a big part. However it has changed. Chester let T-Mobile build a tower in 2010. The rest of what has been built was over 10 years ago. There are lots of NIMBY types in the background here. I can understand now wary things played out this way. Hopefully they play out differently in the future. The biggest thorn here is Frontier. Hopefully the IBOP project makes backhaul more affordable here. It's pretty bad if Verizon has elected to run their own fiber lines in rather than use Frontier, it has pushed us near the back of Verizon's LTE deployment.

In six rural markets where VZW was forced to divest Alltel, it was bought by ATNI Commnet and is operated under the Alltel brand through a license from Verizon which still owns the Alltel brand. Of course, ATN churned customers like crazy in my market overall, most of them porting to Verizon.

I need to move so I can get Sprint. Come think of it, I have many better reasons to move.

Anyway it was a terrible decision of tower placement by Roberts Tower Company and Alamosa PCS, Sprint affiliates that aren't around anymore. I wonder why. AJ, I think you underplay traffic coming through Chester. The Chester bridge is the single bridge between the JB Bridge and the Emerson Bridge at Cape. I have family that lives in that area and they all have either VZW or Alltel which covers that area well. Roberts erected all the towers in question. Their businesses are almost all in deep financial trouble. In contrast, I'm pretty clear Sprint built the coverage from Saint Mary north on 55 as well as the cells at Red Bud, which might have originally been Nextel but later with Sprint CDMA added on.

It isn't their fault all the time. Only now do you have a Direct Connect solution that is really compelling for business and government users. Sprint can also put SMR to good use with LTE and 1x Advanced. I suspect QChat can be adapted for use over LTE. When that happens, look out. The whiny iDEN users could be making a comeback.

I may just go prepaid and Audi 5000 off VZW. Just pay for the new iPhone on full price, then use RedPocket on AT&T's HSPA+. The cost savings would make up for the price of an unsubsidized device over time.

No one lives in this area, and it's FOUR towers. Ugh.

Good to hear.

That's probably a big reason why Alltel left Randolph County and closed their corporate store down in Sparta, which ironically enough was in Wal-Mart, when they bought First Cellular. That said, it was a hideously bad decision on their part to not have a stand alone store somewhere in Randolph County. In Chester, where the mom and pop store is still in existence, lots of people drive to the Supercenter 17 miles away in Sparta. Unfortunately I can't do that with mobile service short of moving. It would be a harder case to make if AT&T were all the way through Chester with 850 spectrum. As it is Chester sits on that border where only Verizon has contiguous low-frequency spectrum until Sprint 800 SMR comes into play. Under current considerations? It's probably not a good idea to compete here. With that spectrum coming online? I think that's the game changer. The SMR spectrum is the beachfront property currently being cleared of the ungrateful. When it's being put to better use we'll see major improvements in rural coverage. That said, there are some towers Sprint has in much more rural areas not far from me that make NO sense. All the towers Sprint long ago put up on rural Route 3 between Gorham and Cape Girardeau, MO with virtually no population in those areas is a prime example. All areas very well covered by Big Red and with HSPA+ from AT&T bleeding across from Missouri. That tower placement is classic Old Sprint. The good news is that Sprint is moving on from that with Network Vision.

There's probably 5000 customers here on VZW and 100 on the other providers combined.

I sensed your reply was based on something relating to how PCS licenses were awarded. I also sense that Sprint would not have been wise to put up service here before 2013. I think factors are different this time around. The decision to deploy 800 in LTE is a big part in how rural markets could be better this time around. So in that regard, my post was not meant as a slam against Sprint either.