bretton88

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Spint's roaming partner in Idaho, Syringa Wireless will close its doors on Dec 31.

http://www.rcrwireless.com/20150903/carriers/another-rural-carrier-bites-the-dust-as-syringa-wireless-set-to-close-at-year-end-tag2

I wonder if Sprint will acquire it's assets to turn that area into native coverage.

Exactly. We have 2 choices, ATT DSL with a max speed of 3-6 Mbps with a cap at 150Gb or Mediacom who is despised in this area and caps their plan at 250 Gbs (unless you want to pay more for a larger cap)

But even Mediacom is cheaper than that. They're 75$ for 100mbps and that's with a 1TB cap and no discounts (so that's the highest price you pay). I think the reaction is more that SpeedConnect owns almost all the 2.5 ghz spectrum, so Sprint can't reasonably deploy Spark. That ad is one of the big reasons Sprint service sticks in the Quad Cities.

Ruh roh - appears to be a major outage. Text messages not sending/receiving.

Glad it's not just me. I thought maybe it was just my home tower.

Technically most T mobile customers aren't running out of data, they are just getting throttled. My guess is the network speeds that they brag so much about are encouraging people to consume more data.

No third rail. Kansas City does not have a subway, and that makes it a terrible city.

 

 

AJ

I'd take that literally, but I enjoy just joyriding subway systems. So only a personal preference. If KC had a subway system I'd move there in a heartbeat. Fwiw, I actually like using the KC airport because it's so nice and compact, it makes for convenient departure and arrival.

amen to this! optimization needs to happen so bad around here (here being des moines)! and not just cranking up the power on B26 and optimizing it, B25 needs it too. i find places all over the metro (on B25) where running a speedtest near a tower nets a 20+ meg download yet going down the road a bit will drop you down to 5 meg or less. i'm convinced that the rootmetrics report speeds were more due to bad optimization affecting the results then they were from towers being overloaded.

It's more that there are still a lot of drops to 3G, especially here in eastern Iowa in areas that B26 should be able to cover. I really hate not being able to hold onto a -112 B25 signal and dropping to 3G, it happens a lot here in cedar rapids.

Let's just say T-mobile is not the only one deploying new cell equipment in Montana right now.

Sure. Verizon is too [emoji3]

Touchwiz is probably the reason I don't get a Samsung phone. I guess I was turned off by it when I had my Epic 4G Touch.

AJ, you might be interested in this revent article about Walmart - king of the suburbs - and modifications they have been making to attract talent to their HQ.

 

Fair use quote:

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/21/why-wal-mart-an-icon-of-suburbia-had-to-urbanize-its-hometown/

 

Now obviously Kansas City is much bigger than Bentonville, but the challenges Sprint faces to recruit are similar.

 

Transit is poor. Walkable neighborhoods are rare, access to future career oppertunities is limited. In NYC, if you are tired of company A, companies B, C, D......Omega etc are down the street. In Kansas? Who is going to poach you?

 

Houston, incidentally has the similar design problem. However, thanks to the energy market, it DOES provide recruits a mass of options on employment. In their case, the companies are there due to geograhic proximity to their product. Not so much for Sprint.

 

You might like to live in a cul-de-sac, and theres nothing wrong with that. The fact is, in aggregate, young educated talent does not. That is why company after company is relocating from the suburbs to a dense, central city. People want to walk from the bar to their apartment. They want a famers market on the corner. They want gourmet restaurants by trendy chefs.

 

Kansas City, unfortunately, is a giant suburb, meaning relocating from Overland Park to downtown wouldnt make a diffference in recruiting. Now this isnt an attack on Kansas City. Fresno is the same. So is Phoenix. And dozens of other western and southern cities.

 

You may be an educated geographer, but I have a Masters in City and Regional Planning. I still cant identify a Sprint antenna on a pole, but when it comes to demographics, economic trends, transportation, and what people are looking for in making their decissions on where to live and work, I am fully up to date on the statistics and literature.

 

When it comes to recruiting, Kansas City is a liability, not an asset.

 

The question is, is it enough of a liability to justify a very expensive move?

It isn't that much of a liability, not enough to move. It's just not a top choice for young people these days. But in the end, that's easy to overcome, just pay a little more than the other guys.

Look, as an educated geographer, I am no advocate of urban sprawl. But are you telling me that Millenials like living side by side or on top of one another and using public transportation? They do not like having affordable houses with yards and being able to drive on non congested freeways to anywhere in a huge metro -- including those supposedly desirable dense urban districts -- within 30 minutes?

 

I did not know these things. But if they are so, just more reasons why Millenials are the most annoying generation ever.

 

AJ

I will give it this, traffic isn't bad in KC. And eventually us Millennials settle down and have a family. Then KC looks a lot better. Just generally not right out of college. Not much KC can do about the curse of being in the Midwest anyways.

KC is not a great city for Millennials. Terrible transit, lots of driving to get around, not a ton of density to allow for walkability and community. So it will be harder to attract young talent there. To KCs credit, it is starting to evolve and it has all the ingredients to become a premier city and the nice weather helps. I should note that these challenges are not unique to KC, but KC is definitely coming around.

If they don't grandfather existing plans in, then there's little reason to keep on them since it will basically be a price increase.

Can always force a hostile takeover...

Would be amazing, but it's owned by the City of Brookings. Some convenient campaign donations to the city council might work though

I have not been happy with hotel WiFi the past two years. Of my 2 dozen hotels stays in the past 24 months, only one had a great WiFi experience. A handful were mediocre, but usable. The vast majority were under 500kbps. And a few completely unusable.

I've been fortunate to have decent hotel WiFi lately. I find Marriott hotels (all chains) are generally better. But I'm platinum with them, so I get free access to their paid tier.

Just FYI, staff has known for several weeks that the tested RF performance of this Moto X is only about average. In other words, not great. It may be a jack of all trades, master of none. We will run an update to our existing article, write a follow up article, or post here with ERP/EIRP figures -- once we have confirmed with Sprint that this handset will be whitelisted.

 

AJ

That's interesting. Did they get rid of the dynamic antenna that was supposed to help out with that?

That sounds a bit too good to be true. Apparently the commenters on that article seem to agree. If it is true, I don't care at all about the price, it will be mine.

 

I've said several times over that I'm done with Samsung BUT I do love a good camera, which the Nexus' have lacked. If they actually use that LG camera module then I'm willing to trade off the sealed up battery (my other real bugaboo), for Nexus bloat-free-ness and fast updates (why I skipped the G4). I'm giving up on water resistance, it seems crazy that more people don't demand that from their devices, but whatever.

I don't see why this wouldn't be the specs for that price. Several other flagships (Motorola, Oneplus, etc) are doing similar specs for that price.

But aren't most (or all) of the GMO sites GMOs because of pretty much those same logistic, structural, municipal or technical reasons? So wouldn't that leave the GMOs in the same situation they're currently in?

No, a lot of GMOs are in rural areas, that are very capable of being upgraded to Tri-Band. But because they are low use sites, the decision was made to not fully upgrade them.

I would interpret this to mean they are going to make every macro site support all three bands, except those that cannot for logistic, structural, municipal or technical reasons. Hopefully this means the end of the GMO is nigh.

 

Using Nexus 6 on Tapatalk

This would make me the happiest person ever. Hopefully it happens soon.

My understanding was this would be a RRP agreement where the LTE roaming would be considered "native"? Maybe that's changed? Haven't kept up with this in a while.

 

sent from an underwater dust storm from my Sprint S5

USCC, while part of the CCA, did not join the Roaming Partnership.

This will be huge for the Wisconsin Sprint market where USCC is mature and pervasive in the western half of the state that's devoid of Sprint coverage.

Sadly, a roaming deal is no guarantee of Sprint getting access to the USCC network. It is always possible that they just are paying the partner to roam on their network. Honestly, if Sprint doesn't change the roaming cap, access to USCC LTE doesn't mean much either.

Maybe they are talking about Sprint in this US Cellular LTE roaming deal: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/us-cellular-keeps-postpaid-subscriber-growth-chugging-along-q2/2015-07-31?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=feedly&utm_campaign=rss

Being that they have done network testing together in the past, Sprint would be one of the networks that they could get initialized in such a short time frame.

Just FYI, staff has known for several weeks that the tested RF performance of this Moto X is only about average. In other words, not great. It may be a jack of all trades, master of none. We will run an update to our existing article, write a follow up article, or post here with ERP/EIRP figures -- once we have confirmed with Sprint that this handset will be whitelisted.

 

AJ

That being the big question. Right now Sprint on their customer forums says that they have not received the device for testing yet so can not say if it will be a compatible device.

Motorola now claims that the Pure Edition supports all 3 Sprint bands.

I'm shocked that hangouts hasn't been baked into Android similar to iMessage. I was also shocked to learn that Android M will introduce native visual voicemail. Two things Android should have been all over.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone 6

Google tried making hangouts the default messaging app kit kat, they forced the issue on nexus phones. Verizon basically veto-ing it was the big problem (note that the nexus 5 doesn't run on Verizon). Then users hated it, so Google surrendered and gave the standalone messaging app back.

It's entirely possible that Sprint has no idea what Ntelos plans to do. They don't have to communicate with each other.