radem

I think all Apple CDMA enabled iPhones sold in the past few years use SRLTE by default.  Apple patented their implementation of SRLTE a few years ago which may be a little different than the way other phones use SRLTE.

13 minutes ago, utiz4321 said:

You are mixing up different things into the net neutrality basket. ISP were messing and are messing with torrent sites because content providers were threatening them with law suits. The part about netflix is true but why do you carw who gets what profits? 

I care that I can send and receive whatever traffic I want on my connection without my ISP deciding what I should be able to use.  I use my wired connection for work and for entertainment.  I transfer a lot of data and I do not want anyone messing with my traffic in any way.

The FCC has decided that with 3 nationwide wireless providers there would not be enough competition but with most areas having 2 wired ISPs or less, that the monopoly practices of the wired ISPs are just fine with them.

23 hours ago, utiz4321 said:

They haven't at anypoint from the creation of the internet to 2015 when net neutrality went into effect. 

Yes, they were starting to mess with traffic and that is why Net Neutrality was put into effect.  It started with a demand that Netflix pay your ISP to carry high speed traffic to you over the ISP interconnections without being throttled.  They also started messing with torrent traffic to keep people from using torrenting programs.  Now they have low caps on high speed connections while exempting their own content from their caps or forcing their competitors streaming products to lower bandwidth so they have an inferior product.  I have to pay $30 extra each month to so that I can go over 1TB of data download in a household were I often work from home and all our entertainment is streaming.

Net Neutrality was supposed to be about forcing ISPs to be dumb carriers and not allowing them to mess with any traffic that they carry. Without it we will continue down the path of monopoly ISPs deciding what internet traffic to pass to and from their customers and at what speed.

I switched to DirecTV Now streaming a year ago along with Netflix and Hulu.  DirecTV Now was unreliable for the first 6 months but it has been quite good since then.  It has a very good channel selection and I get a discount with my wife's AT&T mobile unlimited plan.  At the moment it is still limited to two streams at a time but early next year they are planning to offer DVR functionality and additional streams that may be premium add-ons for additional money each month.  Two streams at a time is not really a problem for my family because many of the network apps work with it such as HBO Go.  The streams on the network apps do not count as one of your active streams.

The picture quality is excellent but it eats a lot of data to get high picture quality on a television.  They recommend a minimum 12 mbps download speed to watch the highest quality as the app streams the video in bursts greater than 6 mbps.  If you have a slower connection and you are using your connection for anything else at the same time, the picture can buffer and switch you to a lower quality.

2 hours ago, WiWavelength said:

Yes, but 0.5 Mbps uplink at -110 dBm RSRP on the downlink is at least an order of magnitude greater than what is needed to support Calling Plus.  Unless network congestion is a factor, uplink data speeds alone are not the bottleneck.  Rather, if those uplink data speeds are low because of retransmissions due to poor handset uplink RF output, then the uplink may have difficulty keeping up with near real time Calling Plus transmissions, even at 0.5 Mbps.

AJ

VOIP uses 8kbps to 90kbps up while you are talking and that same speed down while the other person is talking.  The actual bandwidth is based on the algorithm used with higher numbers of bits required for HD voice and lower for regular voice and more bits are used for a larger range of sounds.  The algorithms for streaming audio which VOIP uses automatically adjust the amount of data used based on the range of sounds they are trying to send at that time.  VoLTE is normally in the 16kbps to 32kbps range.

0.5mbps is the same as 500kb/s just to give you some idea of how much bandwidth you really have available.  At the highest possible quality and bit rate of 64kbps to 90kbps (which are almost never used on VoLTE connections) , near CD quality music could be broadcast over your VOIP call.  Those speeds are still less than 20% of your 0.5mbps speed or less than 5% if you are using closer to the minimum amount of standard voice bandwidth.

4 minutes ago, JThorson said:

What did Pete ever do to you? 

1 minute ago, WiWavelength said:

Pete is an ignorant slut.

AJ

Are you saying that Son drinks Pete's Sake?  If so, I need to try some of that. 

19 minutes ago, Mr.Nuke said:

No on both counts. Guidance for this year is $3.5 to $4 billion. Through the first 2 quarters they've spent $1.8 billion so they're on track there.

Years in this context refers to fiscal years. For Sprint the fiscal year ends on 3/31, meaning next year would be a little under 5 months away.

It is interesting that they will ramp up spending about the projected time they can start adding 800mhz in the Mexico border exclusion area.  If I was Sprint, I would pour money into Southern California to get 800mhz going asap.  That is a massive population area that is currently suffering without a low band.

I always wonder what people are doing on their mobile connection that say that an upload over 5mb/s is not fast enough.  The pictured upload is faster than my real world speed tests on my home internet connection rated at 75mb/s down and 8mb/s up.  Any time my mobile connection is faster than my home internet, it is perfectly fine with me. 

Extremely fast upload is for hosting servers or uploading very large files.  Neither of those are what mobile connections are designed for.  That upload speed should do everything you want to do on a mobile connection quite quickly.

37 minutes ago, mmark27 said:

that doesn't work for me on Chrome

http://s4gru.com/forums/topic/7754-site-upgrade-warning/?do=getNewComment

This forum topic shows the newest comments since you last looked at it on the above link on all browsers that it supports.

13 minutes ago, mmark27 said:

Does anyone know what the URL to get to the latest post is now for links? Prior to the website update, I always ended my weblinks with 

"ng-galaxy-s8-dual-simduos/?view=getnewpost"

which would take me to the newest post. I can't seem to figure out if that's possible anymore? I just get to the front page. Hitting the unread section top right sort of works, but is a little quirky too as I get all the posts instead of the thread I want.

/?do=getNewComment

I would think that tethering it would significantly limit where it could fly.  No one is going to allow a tethered vehicle to fly above a stadium as an example.

29 minutes ago, twospirits said:

Isn't that dependent on how long the battery holds up to keep that unit up in the air?

I assume the plan is that a new flying micro cell would be launched into the air before the old flying micro cell depleted its batteries.  Then the old flying micro cell one would be flown down to a manned charging station, where its batteries would be exchanged with fully charged ones.

The manned charging station could be located at a COW (Cell on Wheels) site that was providing coverage from one side of the event and providing the bandwidth for the flying micro cell.  Think of how nice the coverage would be with COWs surrounding a large event with flying micro cells providing coverage in the middle from above.

The total percent of subscribers graph shows everything you need to know about the current US wireless industry.  Verizon has ~35%, AT&T has ~35%, and all the other competitors are competing for the final 25% to 30%.  This also means that 70% to 75% of all the profits are split between AT&T and Verizon which gives them the money to keep deploying and keeps them with much larger, stronger networks.  If AT&T and Verizon can each afford to spend $10 billion+ on their networks each year, no smaller competitor can hope to keep up.

Sprint has some of the best spectrum for dense areas with their huge amount of Sprint2500/2600mhz.  T-Mobile has some of the best wide area rural coverage and in building spectrum with the combination of Tmobile600/Tmobile700/Sprint800mhz.  The combination of the two companies plus some mid-band coverage should allow them to provide great coverage.  Keep 1 CDMA voice carrier and 1 GSM voice carrier and re-farm everything else to voLTE.  The network should be able to perform well for years.

I wonder if in a future software update will they allow Magic Boxes to daisy chain off each other in certain conditions to extend coverage out?  I believe the hardware has the capability of doing this.  

One of the conditions I am thinking of is when a Magic Box can see no macro band 41 and no macro band 25 but can see a signal from a functioning integrated into the network Magic Box. Another is when two or more magic boxes are located at the same address such as a large building and one gets a b41 signal but another can only get a b25 signal.  Another daisy chain possibility is when a LTE femtocell is present.

If a merger is approved, the first thing that will likely happen is native roaming on each other's network.

For T-Mobile users it is as simple as enabling VoLTE and connecting on any Sprint LTE Bands that their device is able to use when T-Mobile LTE is not available.  At the start, IP addresses are not portable between the two carriers so they would likely use T-Mobile LTE first and only use Sprint LTE if no T-Mobile LTE was available.

For Sprint users, it is a little more complicated but would likely involve connecting to T-Mobile LTE for data when Sprint LTE is not available and enabling T-Mobile GSM calling whenever CDMA voice calling is not available.  This would have to stay in place for a while since VoLTE (Calling Plus) is not available on most devices and is not yet ready for mass roll-out.  At the start, IP addresses are not portable between the two carriers so they would likely use Sprint LTE first and only use T-Mobile LTE if no Sprint LTE was available.

Over time, Sprint phones would get T-Mobile VoLTE.  The Sprint voice core centers would be switched over to handle T-Mobile calling technologies.  The data core centers would be configured for common portable IP addresses so that movement between the two LTE networks would be seamless.

I got that email today as well.  They must have mass mailed everyone who ordered one who has not yet been contacted.

Normally I'd say that's fine, but Google maps doesn't even work at that speed (which is pretty much all I use my phone data for overseas). Most of the time things just time out instead at 64kbps.

 

Sent from my SM-N920P using Tapatalk

You do have to actually get nearly the full 64kb/s speed for what I said to be true.  Google Maps works at that speed as long as you do not go to satellite view.  If you are only getting 10kbps or slower either up or down then almost nothing will work.  I experienced this lack of data several times when I roamed on Verizon CDMA.  I expect slow GSM has the same problem.  This is why LTE roaming is so important.  It is much more likely that you will get the full roaming speed or close to it when roaming on LTE.

Totally agree, 64 kb/sec is a joke.  They should at least up it to 128 kb/sec to be usable for anything.

I am sure they chose 64kb/s (8,000 bytes per second) for a reason.  It can do almost everything on your telephone other than stream video but it will send and receive data much slower than normal.  That speed is more than fast enough to stream audio, send and receive text messages, send and receive email without attachments, and even do VoLTE if the correct compression codec is used.  It is fast enough to run just about anything you want in the background on your phone such as email refreshes or streaming your favorite compressed music. 

64kb/s just operates very slowly if you upload or download even moderately sized pictures or other files and is nearly worthless for any type of video uploads or downloads.  Much of the internet is designed for connections slower than 64kb/s.  An example is that a single 5MB picture could take more than 10 minutes to upload or download.  However as long as you get the full 64kb/s and your connection does not break, it should work if you wait long enough.

On connections of this speed you can expect the following:

• Sending or receiving MMS messages will likely not work or will very slowly and may timeout before it completes
• Email with attachments will be terribly slow and could take an unbearably long time to finish sending or receiving a single email in the background with an attachment
• Downloading anything including app updates will be terribly slow
• Facetime, Skype or other video chat will not work
• Any type of streaming video including video embedded in web pages, Facebook, etc. may timeout
• Most streaming audio should work as long as it is set at a lower quality but it may take a while to start as it may have to buffer for a while before it starts.
• VoLTE if enabled should work fine.  AT&T VoLTE uses the AMR-WB codec, which consumes variable data rate of up to 23.85kbps upload or download data while that side of the conversation is sending over the voice channel depending on the range of the sounds it is sending.  Generally only one person is talking at a time so either your upload or download is in use on a VoLTE call unless you are talking over each other and then both are in use.
• Mapping and direction applications should work fine unless you are downloading satellite view which will be very slow
• All of your other games and apps should work but may work slower than normal

Yeah, Verizon is not a perfect carrier by any stretch. When you add up all the pros and cons, VZW will be a better choice for many people. But they are not perfect. I encounter sites that are overburdened all the time. And if you travel internationally, Tmo and Sprint are likely better options. I type this as I am in Canada at the moment (using Tmo). I basically had to turn off my work VZW phone here.

 

Using Tapatalk on Note 8.0

When you have phones from different providers that is when the mobile hot spot feature really shines.  Just have your Verizon phone use the WiFi connection from your T-Mobile phone.  Then you can use both phones. 

I do this whenever either my Sprint phone or my wife's AT&T phone does not get a signal in some location.  We just turn on the mobile hot spot for whichever phone does work and let the non-working phone use data through the working phone.

$30 per gig of 3G speed data on Open World is convenient, easy and cheap. Plus, the 64 kbps that Global Roaming offers is way too slow to get anything done in today's world. It would be nice if they bumped the throttle up to 128kbps like T-Mobile or maybe even higher, but past 128kbps, they would probably start paying enough in roaming fees that they wouldn't be able to offer the plan for free anymore.

 

I personally think Sprint should probably merge the plans for the sake of making things easier, simpler and less of a hassle for average customers. Average people just want for their phone to work and to spend as little as possible. Additionally, a consolidated Open World and Global Roaming would be very similar to T-Mobile's international offering (the throttled data would just be a little slower).

I believe that my mobile devices should just work in as many places as possible without me having to do anything special or charging me a huge cost.  This ability to use my mobile device where ever I am is something that I expect to be included in every plan with no need to buy something special or go online and add a global roaming feature.  I need voice calling, SMS messaging and at least a slow data connection to be able to send and receive iMessages, MMS, send and receive email, and navigate me through unfamiliar places in other countries.  These are things that I think are important for my personal safety and to get me to where I need to be when traveling.  I really do not want to be in a situation where I am getting no service where I am traveling but there is mobile service available that Sprint has not made a roaming agreement with.

I can wait while some of my apps refresh their data slowly or if it takes a while to download my email or send a new email.  If I need any type of streaming or other higher bandwidth functionality, I can use WiFi or pay additional for 1GB of higher speed.  I would like Sprint to make paying for that higher data speed easy so that I can do that when necessary. It should default back to low speed automatically when the additional amount of high speed data that I paid for has been used up or expires.

Disney started upgrading their WiFi throughout the California Disney Land Parks a couple years ago in preparation for the introduction of the same Magic Band equipment that is in use in the Florida Disney World parks.  The Magic Band project is significantly behind its original schedule since much of the work can only be performed on it at night when the parks are closed.  From what I have heard, some (maybe most) of the funding for expanding the Magic Band project has been redirected to security improvements and to the new Star Wars park changes.  The Magic band readers that get installed at the beginning of every ride are configured to work over WiFi if a wired network can not be easily run to that location.

The Magic Band project is very expensive and requires a large amount of equipment to be installed, tested, and proven to be reliable under all conditions.  Customers will not tolerate putting their Magic Band up to a reader and having that reader not working due to a WiFi overload or outage.  Once the WiFi part of that project is completed, Most Disney Land park guests will be on a usable WiFi network.  That frees up the macro cellular network capacity in the entire area.

Inside the convention center I get 20 mbs in the ballroom. Signal is very strong around -80db. I figured they had a DAS since I see what looks like round antennas on the ceiling in several places in the convention center. Not going to Disney so can't give my experience there.

 

Sent from my SM-N920P using Tapatalk

Those round antennas in the convention center most likely are part of http://visitanaheim.org/press-releases/2015/01/14/anaheim-convention-center-installs-first-its-kind-high-density-wifi

This is a high quality WiFi system.  I do not know if they installed a DAS at the the same time but they may well have.  It could also be some type of Sprint automatic WiFi hand-off like Sprint has in some airports.  700 WiFi access points and 10gbs of free public WiFi bandwidth is significant for a venue that holds up to 50,000 people if every room is used at the same time.  Certainly that WiFi keeps many people off the macro cell systems in the area.  Sprint used to be inoperable there during large events.

radem: Do you know how many Sprint lines your business has?  Just curious if they're targeting larger (valuable) business, or if they might provide this for all business.  Also, how is the Sprint LTE signal inside your business now?

Also, thanks for the post.. interesting stuff! 

My company is a very large business customer for Sprint.  We have full WiFi coverage in our buildings and most everyone is using WiFi calling so we really have no issues.  Some of the buildings have a lot of brick on them so signal strength when not on WiFi can be a challenge deep inside some of them.

My company got a letter from Sprint Business today in the mail about a Sprint LTE Plus Booster.  The letter was sent via postal mail to my business billing address about what appears to be a Sprint LTE Plus outdoor to indoor repeater.  It will be interesting to see if this is being offered all over the country to Sprint business customers or if this is a limited roll-out and if businesses are eligible for more than one of these.  If anyone has more information about what this device is and how it works, please post here. 

All highlights below are as listed in the letter received by my company.

Dear Sprint Customer,

We know how important it is to be connected, all the time, virtually everywhere.  To your work, your business and your people, which is why Sprint is laser-focused on keeping our status that no one beats Sprint in Chicago.  As you may have heard, Sprint has an incredible network in Chicago.  In fact, we recently tied for first place in network reliability, call performance and text performance according to independent third-party testing.

Our Chicago network gets better every day as we work to deliver the consistent reliability, capacity and speed that your business requires.  As a thanks for being a valued customer, we would like to provide you with a Sprint-owned data booster that is free to use to further strengthen your Sprint LTE signal.

Placement of the LTE Plus Booster in your building(s) will deliver next level service and does NOT require any IT infrastructure or capital.  It's the size of a small shoebox.  We'll simply place it in or by a window that provides the best signal strength, plug it in and you can enjoy your improved Sprint data experience.

It's easy.  Visit sprint.com/booster and fill out the form to request a data booster. If eligible, we will contact you to schedule a time for a Sprint team member to deliver the box and place it in an ideal location to provide you with the best signal strength.

Thank you for making Sprint a part of your business.  We are honored to provide your business with solutions to help you and your people collaborate, mobilize and accelerate.

Sincerely,

Jim Mills

President of the Illinois and Wisconsin Region

G. Jason Schnellbacher

Director of Strategic Programs.