Fraydog

Maybe that was a bit much, OK. I'll give you that. Sprint still has an opportunity from everyone else falling on their face. Verizon won't even have LTE here until 2013. Alltel may never go LTE here. AT&T can build out elsewhere in the CMA and meet their buildout requirements. I wish you would look at that aspect of it, as well as the fatally flawed decision of the FCC to approve the ATNI buyout of Alltel. I wish Alltel had gone back to a local partner, or got swallowed by a provider with a better reputation than ATNI like USCC for example. I honestly think you're looking at the spectrum situation and thinking I am in a competitive market. If it were a competitive market, Verizon would have less than 95% of the consumers in my town. Chester has issues because of location. I get that. It's not like Sprint has to reinvent the wheel here. Most of the factors aligned against their past expansion have reversed in their favor.

Well, the Mobilenation people are not moving any further north. I just saw an FCC filing where SI Wireless, d/b/a Mobilenation terminated their license subleases in all of Illinois, and most of Missouri with Sprint. Sprint is back to 40 MHz they squat on here in most of Randolph County, in a region where there is no mobile competition to speak of. They acquired the spectrum they leased from Sprint in Western Kentucky and Western Tennessee. This explains why new towers got added in Martin and Union City. That area was not part of the sublease, nor is it part of the spectrum Sprint sold to Mobilenation. With native roaming it made sense to add to their coverage at those sites. I still believe that adding NV sites in 2013 at Sparta and Chester would be a net positive. Through the rest of Southern Illinois they can rely on where they have 3G roaming. Maybe they can strike a deal with a local telecom here to resell service. The problem Sprint has here is the large amount of 1x roaming where customers traveling though get stuck on. AAV, which was not always accessible here, is finally proliferating. That's the good news. IBOP Southern will be signing up consumers here very soon. Sprint also needs a reseller here. I think the local RadioShack and Wal-Mart could fill in. With online ordering, I see that model becoming more of a dinosaur. Our VZW Premium Retailer sucks here, most of their phones are display phones and as a result I have to drive to Fairview Heights or Carbondale just to try new phones. Anyway all of our other options are sucky here, as Alltel won't add LTE until 2013, AT&T has the tower HSPA+ ready but doesn't have an affordable backhaul option, and T-Mobile might be able to add a microwave to their cell but they don't want to use the IBOP Southern backbone, Frontier, or the local cable company.

I'm in as a sponsor now. I had to read this thread to find the button.

Cross fire

That's pretty.

When NV is being deployed in the north side of Chicago proper, is it going to cause lots of issues for Sprint? I only ask because I have lots of friends on Sprint there.

Baker street.

Kentucky Wildcats

Charlotte's Web

AJ, That's why. I live in the beige. AT&T and T-Mobile are EDGE here and Alltel...ugh don't get me started there. That's why almost everyone here has VZW. Alltel probably comes closest on coverage but it's hard for them to sell here when they didn't leave any stores open here in Randolph County after they bought out First Cellular. Sad thing is, Alltel 3G isn't that bad speed wise but they won't even have LTE anywhere in their footprint if Michael Prior's comments in the Alltel Conference Call for Q1 2012 ring true. Even still they have no iPhone for Mom and no high end Android phones. So no go there. Backhaul is a bad thing here too. VZW has cited backhaul as the reason for an LTE delay into 2013 here as they are putting their own fiber optic lines in here. They don't want to use anything left for Frontier. AT&T's site is HSPA+ ready right now but not backhauled, and the same goes for T-Mobile. Sprint probably balked at putting a site in here because of backhaul. IBOP grants are building out fiber here but I don't think it will be ready soon. It's a really bad situation.

What is the world coming to when people don't get Seinfeld references?

Direct Connect over the same area.

That's hella good coverage for 1900.

Or they could just buy the small innovators much like Microsoft did when Gates was running the show in the 80's and 90's.

I expect HTC and Samsung to attempt to block the iPhone 5 if they still use the same notification system. That threat might get Apple back to the negotiating table.

The Qualcomm baseband in the EVO 4G LTE and GS3 will be much better. Yeah, Via really effed up on the Nexus. That device has major issues on VZW as well. Only the global Nexus sold in thr Play Store performs well with RF IMO. That's only a real option on AT&T and T-Mobile.

Please do tell us where you're at.

Wall painting

Having the iPhone for Virgin is more about customer retention than bringing new customers in, though I can understand why price conscious consumers would want to move from Sprint to Virgin, considering that Virgin is basically Sprint's branding for prepaid along with Boost.

Some of it was that and some of it was interference in the A block which has been curtailed somewhat since the creation of that band.

Without that $10 per smartphone customer, Sprint doesn't have the money to build out Network Vision.

Irony: Samsung bought Vilingo which Siri kind of copied before Apple bought them. But don't tell the raving Apple fanboys about that. Apple and Samsung should just cross license patents and get it over with, IMO. Samsung is a large supplier for Apple and I am not sure p***ing off a supplier is such a hot idea.

I suspect the division of Band 12 and Band 17 will eventually be undone. Either when AT&T realizes they need to work with USCC on rural LTE deployment, or when the FCC realizes Band 17 has just been a big bluff. The issues of division on Band 12 and Band 13 are much more significant.

I'm going to have to play devil's advocate here. I sense the frustration of the people like the poster who I presume got ban hammered. He chose to express the frustration in the wrong way. He does have the right to be upset, however. It's simply more difficult to see the future even if you own a crystal ball. Most people simply want their network to work. I can understand the frustration of those who crawl along on the Sprint network at EDGE speeds. Furthermore, not everyone has the knowledge or ability to read a white paper on Network Vision or know exactly what a RBS 600 is. Even if they read that white paper they will still have a hard time to translate all that information into believing that it will be different this time. Knowing Sprint's history, that's a hard sell. I am one of the people who thinks NV works. If it doesn't? I don't even want to think about what happens in this industry. Dark place.

I'm bumping this thread as I'm beginning to see what Mobilenation is building out and what Sprint is building out. Apparently the terms of this deal are quite liberal. Sprint itself is building out in Martin, Tennessee, and Mobilenation is building out in some of the other rural areas surrounding Martin. I can tell what is really native by looking at Direct Connect in the map. Mobilenation sites are not CDMA Direct Connect but Sprint sites are. It seems like most of the areas where Mobilenation is are eligible to buy from Sprint as well. This just seems odd for a SRA...or a well placed Trojan for Sprint to boost their coverage where it's mostly weak which it was in Western Kentucky and Western Tennessee. Now if Mobilenation comes north to Southern Illinois remains to be seen. Their original name, oddly enough, was SI Wireless. Looking over their license sublet, apparently Chester and Sparta to the NE were the only towns that were partly in Sprint area and partly in Mobilenation area. Personally I'd prefer Sprint as the one to put up towers on the populated lines of this agreement as I'm sure the Ericsson NV equipment is better than the Huawei base stations used in the Mobilenations deployments.