caspar347

Well that sucks. I guess doing so brings the problems we see on the 3gpp2 side (bad 3G handoffs to/from GMOs) over to the 3gpp side. Damn. Well the rest of my points stand.

No work here either. I know it's worse for areas with a ton of them, but they really disqualify Sprint as a competitor for a lot of people that live around me and are affected by a couple specific ones. I'm not gonna argue that Sprint should halt everything to fix all the GMOs because they have to move forward on everything to survive. And I know straggler sites are inevitable. But really, GMOs are in some ways worse than a coverage gap because they can really screw up all surrounding sectors and obviously the 3G fallback to the GMO itself is usually worse than Verizon 1x roaming. So I would think that they'd be a bigger priority. Or at least enough to warrant a semi-permanent COW in areas where the network is otherwise OK. Or a project to get LTE live on all of them. (Yeah I know GMO LTE is painfully awful; I live next to one and have been dealing with it for about two and a half years now. But it's still a huge network capacity boost vs the one or two EVDO carriers the 3G GMO sites currently have and I would think limited range LTE for offloading is better than nothing, even when it's SISO. That's still over 15mbps of extra capacity compared to the 3 or 6 mbps you got from EVDO. Especially since the "we're not gonna bother with GMO LTE because we're gonna come back and make it a full build" stuff never happened and it looks like GMOs are stuck with whatever antennas are up there for the rest of time. But hey, I'm not an engineer.)

They really aren't any worse than the wood-pole-mounted Verizon ODAS nodes, and there are probably 50+ of those live in all of the top 50 markets.

I used to chalk it up to Sprint using 5x5s and everyone else using 10x10s, but then once I got my Verizon moto E I started realizing that Verizon's second AWS carrier (a 5x5) performs just about as well as the larger first carrier. It's probably my biggest network gripe.

Honestly that's no worse than the wood-mount Verizon small cells. In fact I think total equipment footprint is smaller on these Sprint cells.

Yeah, not sure how they do it but AT&T band 4 routinely outreaches band 26 in my area. And it's only a 10x10 of band 4 so it shouldn't be a massive difference. They really push their gear to the limits.

Yeah. I can totally understand restricting BYOD to triband devices, but beyond that there should be no restrictions. None of the prepaid only BS. That just doesn't make sense as Sprint themselves are trying to move away from subsidies.

It's the glossy black upper back and matte lower back. That's a pretty unique design element. Maybe it's related to HTC being the rumored manufacturer of these devices? Coincidentally was just working on an old EVO LTE that I thought I bricked a year and a half ago. I tried turning it on and it miraculously works somehow. Edit: it would be *legendary* if this thing had a kickstand.

Good point. I skimmed the article, but I must've missed that part. Thanks. My understanding was that they got the entire finished render from an unnamed source.

Historically speaking the Android news/fanclub sites have an annoying tendency to advertise fan-made artist renderings as leaked promo renderings. No idea if that's what's happening here (kinda doubt it since AP is generally pretty reputable) but it's possible.

They definitely need to aim as high as possible and 2770 is a bit disappointing for a 2016-17 mid-high end device, but for me personally the 2700 battery in the 5X has been more than enough. (The only problems come from the steaming pile of battery-eating, overheating, crash-prone trash that is a certain ghost-adorned instant messaging app that's really popular in my age demographic. Not to name names or anything.)

...wow. Can't believe I never figured that out. That explains a lot.

Huh. I knew the changes were not dynamic, but you connect to the same 1x channel every time you visit a given site based on your phone number? TIL. I assumed it was time-based like EVDO. (I should go back and re-read your articles. I've learned a lot since I read them the first time.) Can a site put you on a different channel when initiating a call or can it only put you on another band i.e. 1x800? But you can still end up on a different EVDO channel since that's hashed based on time, right? And yes, I guess it's incorrect to say you have to redial to get to the screens. But it would still be nice to have the data right there in SCP if its possible.

Convenience and logging. The 5X doesn't keep the *#*#33284#*#* screen in the app switcher, so you have to redial to see it again. And automated logging of channels would be really cool, especially since when I'm in an area with diverse channel use (i.e. uptown) I'm usually driving or otherwise in a hurry. I still haven't successfully recorded connecting to all channels present here. That could actually be another reason to get a Sailfish if it gets HTC's awesome engineering screen data.

Yeah, modem data for CDMA would be awesome. Not to hijack the thread, but has any work been done on that?

I just got to looking at this and that 2nd carrier placement looks really weird. My market has a similar PCS holdings layout and I always assumed they'd put the 2nd carrier in either the non-contiguous 5MHz block (for the sake of the possible CDMA carrier at channel 100 (300 in Charlotte's case)) or at the bottom of the 10MHz block so it's easy to expand it to 10x10 in the future. I can't think of any reason they'd put it at the top of the 10MHz block. Plus channel 325, found in the top of the 10MHz block, is the universal 1x channel found throughout this part of the southeast on every single site AFAIK, so it'd be weird to throw that out for a second carrier. What's the "universal" channel in that area? 25?

I wonder if Sprint will add this to the BYOD list or if it'll be relegated to prepaid.

It's really good they're getting aggressive with that. And it makes sense. A network vision site without high capacity magic/RF combiners can only handle 4ish PCS CDMA carriers depending on vendor, right? The only places where having 10+ CDMA carriers spread over 15+ MHz FDD makes sense is in city cores where you can have, say, one site with CDMA on channels 225, 250, and 275, another site with CDMA on channels 300, 325, 350, and 375, and another site with channels 725, 750, and 775 within a few blocks of each other without interference. (That's more or less how it is in uptown Charlotte.) Where I'm at, about 2/3rds of those carriers are EVDO. But in hyper-dense environments like that where density is so great that some sites have 800 disabled, you're gonna be on LTE pretty much all the time anyway. And you'd be on LTE even more with a 10x10 that has better edge cell and interference performance than a 5x5. So it makes sense that they'd refarm three or four (depending on contiguity) EVDO carriers for LTE. Because in the rest of a market, sites are far enough apart that you can have all of them pretty much broadcasting the same three or four CDMA carriers. So you've got almost 10Mhz FDD sitting unused over large portions of the market if it's 15 FDD A-F. (It's already like that in Charlotte.) This should be pretty easy in a 15 MHz A-F market provided adequate density in the center-city, and it appears it can be done in a 10 MHz market too given the right conditions. Of course this is all armchair conjecture, but it all feels right to me. I hope now that most markets are 95+% LTE complete Sprint looks at their options for refarming like this.

I was wondering when the 2016 Nexus thread would show up. Crap. I'm super happy with my 5X, but I really love HTC's industrial design. If it's jaw-droppingly gorgeous there's a teeny tiny chance I'll sell my 5X for a Sailfish. But that's very unlikely. (My 5X is in pretty much perfect condition; shoutout to my awesome Ringke case.) Either way I'm looking forward to the release.

Well assuming Sprint was telling the truth all those times they said they weren't gonna participate/aren't planning around getting more low band, this is good news for Sprint and their shareholders.

Now that yall mention it, something's up with PCIs here. The sector I'm connected to is different from earlier this year. I'll have to take a trip outside to see if the offset is gone, but I don't think it is. I normally don't pay attention to PCIs since they're more or less useless in ALU-land with no patterns, and I didn't notice this whenever it happened because my home sector is only a couple digits off what it used to be. TAC is the same.

I realized after I posted it was possible that reps are supposed to tell people about it. Still, I would think most people would rather DM a Twitter account and have someone get back to them. We've had people report success with phoned-in reports, right?

My thinking is this: I seriously doubt the report volume is significantly overwhelming. In fact, I'd go so far as to say probably less than 5% of subscribers have ever used the "report" function in the Sprint Zone app. I'm probably the only person in the lower half of my city that uses it. I could be wrong on that, but IME nobody outside of this forum actually cares enough to do something like fill out a report. Nearly everybody would find it easier to DM the Sprint Twitter account. It's not advertised anywhere in the app outside of the network tab, and you have to type out a full address if you're reporting in-building coverage problems. So, I'd think it would be trivially easy for Sprint to actually pay attention to those reports if the volume is as low as I'm guessing. If someone outside of this forum goes to the trouble to look up how to send Sprint a problem report, that indicates there's a significant network problem in that area. I have no idea how much attention they pay the reports. For all I know they could be having an engineer read each one personally. But I haven't personally had much success with reports. Maybe it's because I send most of them through an unsupported Nexus 5X? If the problem is really bad I'll go to the trouble of submitting reports on my parents' E8s but that hasn't appeared to make a difference.

As far as I can tell our dual mode sites are STILL single carrier. That's as of about a week ago when I was last near a dual mode site. Edit: removed market-specific ranting that doesn't belong in this thread.

I wouldn't say the tests are deceptive at all, but they could do a better job of indicating they are testing for speed only and include no coverage analysis. Still useful info, especially as capacity becomes a more important metric than coverage in many places.