radem

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/alternative_energy/2013/03/kinetic_energy_harvesting_technology_to_power_lights_cell_phones_medical.html

This article from last year tells you how.

We use http://www.sendwordnow.com at my company for emergency notifications.  It requires the user to respond to the message confirming that they got the message.  If they do not respond to the SMS, it then calls with a voice message that they must respond to.  We find it extremely reliable.

Where's "Noth Dakota"?

 

 

-Anthony

Open your map and look for the state with oil wells all over it.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_oil_boom

Or follow the oil trains (the ones with 100+ black tanker cars) back to where they come from.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_car

I just contacted Sprint and was told that this is not available to customers on corporate plans.  I guess even though I want to give them more money, they will not take it.

Love Bug

Yeah 14.99 a month and I believe the deductible is 150 and they don't cover lost or theft (last time I remembered)

 

I'm a former BBY employee

Last time I tried to take advantage of the Best Buy warranty that I paid for on a product that I had dropped, I was told they do not cover user caused damage as part of their warranty.  If you drop your phone and crack the screen or drop it in water, it likely will not be covered because those are user caused issues that made the product no longer function properly.  I asked the BB rep what they actually cover that is not already part of the manufacturer's standard warranty and they could not tell me any additional benefit other than convenience of going to the store rather than mailing it in.

The Best Buy extended warranty is a total rip-off for products where the most likely damage is user caused and I will never purchase one of their warranties on anything I purchase again if it is a product that I might break.

Book Day

Done

I don't know what they did but today I could hold a phone conversation 1 mile south of Central DuPage Hospital in the woods south of Winfield.  This is the first time in years that the voice hole in this heavily populated road area has not dropped my call in this area.

I hope this stays this way.

When in doubt microwave everything and replace with fiber in the long term.

This is what Sprint should be doing with every site that is still waiting on backhaul right now.  They should prioritize every heavily populated site that does have adequate backhaul to it and deploy microwave ASAP.  Then move to the rural areas that do not have enough backhaul prioritizing by usage on each site.

There is a lot of above ground fiber, stretching pole to pole like Cable TV and power.

 

Robert via Samsung Note 8.0 using Tapatalk Pro

In the Chicago area most fiber run in the winter is at least temporarily run on poles above ground.  Sometimes they go back and bury it when the ground is no longer frozen and sometimes they don't.

Your predictions about 2012 linked from that article are also a great read.  Hopefully 2014 will be the year for at least of them (iPhone supporting 2500 MHz LTE).

I have only been a member here for a little over a year but have learned an incredible amount of information about mobile networks from this site.  That is a credit to your hard work, your network of friends and to this site.

Experience Sprint Network Vision - So fast it will ignite your phone, your tablet, your Mifi, and your tower.

Not sure if you're talking about two different things, but it sounds like you expect Band 26 to make a difference for voice coverage. B26 optimization isn't going to do anything for voice, as it's LTE only. Band Class 10, 1x800, on the other hand, is what you need to fill in those gaps. 1x800 has been live for quite some time, and should already be pretty much set. 

Yes, it should have been fixed by 1x800 (band 10 sorry) but my iPhone 5S is not working properly in this area.  When things like this occur in highly populated "complete" areas, it is no wonder the voice reliability in the tests show a lower than expected score.  It really depends on what device they use for the tests and where they drive during their tests.

There's one thing that agitates me about all this... Sprint is still 4th in the latest RootMetrics measurements in Chicago for call reliability. 

 

http://www.streetinsider.com/Press+Releases/RootMetrics+Report%3A+T-Mobile,+Verizon+Share+Recognition+as+Best+Overall+Carriers+in+Chicago/9585816.html

 

I throw my hands up at this. I thought CDMA 1X Advanced would have jetted Sprint to the top of the metrics here. It hasn't. 

 

I've racked my brain trying to come up with an explanation. I can't. 

I drive through a coverage hole in the western suburbs quite often.  I still lose every voice call that I make or am continuing while in this area on an iPhone 5s.  This hole is one mile south of Central DuPage Hospital to the northern border of Naperville in the village of Winfield and has been there for at least the past two years.  I had a call dropped in that area again today.  I had hoped that B26 would fix the problems in the Winfield Road forest preserve area but they have not had any impact so far.  Hopefully there is more optimization to occur.

Sprint really needs to measure the calls dropped from their towers.  That would help them adjust their coverage in most areas.  Remember the Verizon "Can you hear me now" commercials?  That is what Sprint needs to do as they optimize B26.

Bell Telephone

This is like a Premier Framily plan.  It makes me want to donate all over again.

Seriously, the value of Premier access to this site is worth more than double what this offer costs.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are already paid the costs of transporting data by their subscribers and by peering agreements they have with other ISPs.  I pay AT&T as my ISP to connect to my house and provide a given connection speed, AT&T has a peering agreement with Amazon's ISP.  Amazon pays their ISP to connect to their data center at a given connection speed.  If Amazon's ISP transfers more traffic to AT&Ts network, they pay AT&T a fee.  If AT&T transfers more traffic to Amazon's ISP, AT&T pays Amazon's ISP a fee.  There is no reason why AT&T should require a separate charge to Amazon to keep the peering agreement between AT&T's network and Amazon's ISP running at a proper speed as they are already being paid for this by the peering agreement and Amazon and I are already paying our fees to be able to access this traffic at our ISP's speeds combined with the peering agreement's speed agreed between our two ISPs.

The FCC will not allow ISPs to slow down the data connections for companies who do not pay.  Then the easy way for them to force companies to pay the extra money is to never upgrade and cap their peering bandwidth agreements for the ISPs that carry the non-paying company's data.  Comcast did this recently with Netflix until Netflix paid them money to stop it.  This is just like putting in a high speed toll road around your city and telling people that they can continue to use the slow side streets if the location they are driving to doesn't want to pay for them to use the toll road.  The people have no choice in whether they get to use the toll road or not in this case.  The speed that the people can travel on the side streets is not being degraded unless more traffic joins them on the side streets in the future.  Without using the toll road, they can still get where they are going.  This behavior is widely viewed by all consumers to be unfair as choice is being taken away from the consumer.

Imagine if this had been done 20 years ago.  You would have a handful of very profitable companies from 20 years ago paying every ISP in the world to have high bandwidth delivered over their connections in addition to paying the normal fees to their own ISP.  You would then have the little startup companies like the beginnings of ebay and amazon 20 years ago not able to pay the extra money so their connections would stay at modem speed since that was the standard speed at the time.  20 years later, there is no useful ebay and no useful amazon because modem speed from 20 years ago is not sufficient to use their services properly.  They never would have had the money in the beginning to pay this extra fee so their services would have steadily been degraded compared to company's connections who could pay over the years to the point where they would be useless now. 

The biggest problem I have with this scheme is that I have no control over which companies will never see another speed increase again and which ones will.  Therefore my choice of which companies I would to do business with over the communication medium that I pay for is being taken away.

No one is being capped at 5gb. All Sprint is doing is saying that if you happen to be in an overloaded site, your connetion may slow down a little. People are freaking out at this but normal network bandwith management requires setting priorities to work properly for everyone.

Currently overloaded sites suck for most users and are fine for a few users. They are trying to change the priorities so that the overloaded sites will suck less for most of their customers.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 using Tapatalk

Everyone on an overburdened cell site is being throttled now. This is not adding throttling, it is changing how it occurs when sites are overloaded.

Unfortunately if Netflix or whatever people are requesting from the internet to use huge amounts of data keeps trying to send those huge amounts of data over the airlink to them and takes a while before it slows down. That means that the streaming users have much more data trying to get down the pipe to them than what a typical user has trying to get an email or refreshing their facebook. The typical user is losing right now when not all the traffic can get down that pipe.

This will turn the tables and let more normal usage occur in overburdened sites. I for one am sick of getting no data at some locations even though I am on LTE. I would like to see more of this network control. As users move to band 41, overloads will occur much less often and this problem will be greatly reduced.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 using Tapatalk

I just noticed that comcast upgraded my CMTS to support IPV6 so I was curious and noticed that s4gru.com isn't supporting ipv6

 

Any reason why not?

95% of web sites do not support IPv6 yet.  Once the hosting company for s4gru.com upgrades their network and hosting servers to support IPv6, they will then issue an IPv6 address that can be used for s4gru.com along with the existing IPv4.  Then and only then can you access it via IPv6.  This will likely take many years for all the hosting companies to convert to dual stack IPv4 and IPv6.

Your home computer should already have dual stack IPv4 and IPv6.  s4gru.com and all other IPv4 only websites will continue to work fine for years until they are converted to dual stack IP addresses.

For anyone complaining about too often updates you can refer them to play store > settings > auto update apps > do not auto update.

 

Alternatively, play store > my apps > pick which ever app to not auto update > menu > uncheck auto update.

99% of all users should auto-update every app they have on their mobile device and on their computer.  The vast majority of users have no idea if an update is good or bad.  They often leave publicly known security exploits on their computer or mobile device by staying on old compromised versions of software.  Then their computer or mobile device becomes a spam machine, DDOS machine, key logger, bot, host for bad software, etc. after some bad person on the internet scans for software with certain known exploits.  Most of these scans are run on computers they have already compromised so that they can build up their bot net anonymously.

Only people who really know what they are doing and can tell good updates from bad should worry about manual updates.

Park Place

The behavior is by design; here are the details on the Android developer site. I feel your pain, but SignalCheck uses several of the features on that list. Starting on boot is something controlled by the system, unfortunately there is no way to delay it or work around this. It would open up a very messy can of worms if I added an option to allow moving to SD. Maybe I could somehow sneak an easter egg into the app for you that allows moving to SD, but it wouldn't change the potential issues I mentioned.

 

-Mike

No problem Mike.  SignalCheck is not a very large application so it does not hurt that much to have it in RAM.  You do a great job keeping it as small as you can.