radem

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

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.

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

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.

Mike, Thanks for looking into it. It sounds like it would require a built-in delay if the system was just started or something. That seems odd that Android tries to auto-start apps on the SD card before the SD card is initialized. Maybe at some time in the future we can get this feature working. Of course not everyone has an underpowered, cheap, low RAM tablet like mine that requires them to move everything they can to the SD card. Steve

Any chance you could set the property on SignalCheck to allow it to be moved to an SD card? This is one of only 14 apps on my tablet that cannot be migrated to the SD card.

My case is a Mophie JuicePack which is quite bulky. I only put the case on when I think I will be using my phone heavily and will be at risk of running the battery to zero. Otherwise I keep my iphone naked other than a screen protector and in my pocket with the screen facing me. If I bump my pocket on something, it is the back of the phone that is impacted and not the screen. The only risk that I face from this is the possibility of dropping it. I have a charger in my car, at work on my desk, and at home so in normal daily use I am fine without a case. Very little chance of breaking my phone since I have a job that does not put my phone at risk. If I am traveling or will be away from my normal daily locations for any significant period of time, I put it in the charger case. This makes the charger case last longer.

Freedompop is still selling wimax devices. I have one from them.

I had been experiencing a problem where my Iphone 5S would suddenly change to the wrong time for the past month. I narrowed the issue down to my house as it did not occur when I was away from home and only occurred if I had my phone set to get its time automatically from the network. I finally determined that if my phone connected to my Airvana, my phone time would change to one hour off. If I unplugged my Airvana, the time would go back to the normal time and my phone would go back to 1 bar signal strength. I called Sprint a couple days ago and had a long discussion with Airvana technical support. They tried about a dozen different things to fix it and finally pulled in someone who was working some other customers on the same issue. They agreed to push an update to my Airvana. It now has the correct time and has been fine for the past 2 days at my home. If you have the wrong time on your phone check if it is being caused by your Airvana. If it is, call Sprint and have the update sent to it.

Happy Birthday Robert! We all hope you have many more.

Sprint seems to have some widespread Daylight Saving Time bugs in their NV deployments. Several of us have experienced the 1 hour off time when your phone is set to acquire time automatically from the network. It seems to have started with the "Spring Forward" a few weeks ago. It is possible that the 3G/1x connection that you are moving back to when talking on the telephone has a different time than the LTE network that you are normally on due to this bug. If your time is off and the tower and band you are on has been accepted, you should contact Sprint so they can fix the automatic time in that area.

I was in Myrtle Beach about two weeks ago and compared to a year ago when I was there the coverage was incredible. People with me had AT&T and spent most of the time with either one bar or no signal at all. That is the way Sprint was a year ago. This time, I had LTE and at least two bars and often four or five bars with very usable speeds while my AT&T friends complained about not even being able to send a text message or load Facebook.

So if I read this properly, T-Mobile customers may soon be able to roam on Sprint towers if they follow through with this. That is an interesting alternative to merging the companies. I wonder if next, T-Mobile and Dish will sell their towers and bandwidth to Sprint in exchange for a roaming agreement and tower build-out plan. You will have Sprint, T-Mobile and Dish and others using Sprint nationwide towers with all the companies combined bands running on them. Sounds like this could be major game changer.

The problem is not unlimited data. It is Sprint's network management not throttling users who are using so much data at a time that other users are starved for bandwidth. Throttling of heavy users on towers that are overloaded at that time will solve most problems that heavy users cause. When the tower is overloaded on a particular band and those users cannot be shifted to another tower or another band: Find the top 10 percentile data volume users in the past several minutes and throttle them to a lower speed. If the tower is still overloaded after one minute, do it again. Eventually the heaviest consumers of data during that time will free up enough bandwidth that everyone will have a satisfactory experience. Heavy consumers of data can continue to be heavy users at a lower speed. Tower overloads would be short lived as each tower would automatically shift users to other towers or bands and would reduce heavy user max bandwidth.

For you AJ.

Throttling is almost always preferred by customers over cutting people off when they go over their cap. At least this still allows the phone to be used with small amounts of data. Sprint should really throttle any user with a high amount of usage if the tower they are on is running at capacity at that time.

My Iphone switched to the wrong time overnight. I woke up this morning and looked at the clock and tried to figure out what was going on as the clock was one hour behind. It confused me for a while until I realized that the timezone had changed automatically. I manually set the timezone and all is fine now. If I change it back to "Set Automatically", it changes within 5 minutes to the time before the "Spring Forward" and shows GMT+6 rather than Chicago time. Either Sprint's NV infrastructure is experiencing a Daylight Saving Time bug or Apple's IOS has a bug.

Some executives specialize in expanding companies. Some are turn-around experts and specialize in downsizing, rightsizing and re-organizing the organization. Some excel at setting up companies to be agile, quick decision making machines. Some are great at making the shareholders feel warm and fuzzy. Some are great at tracking the financials and generating return on investment. Some are very good at managing people, retaining talent, hiring new talent. There are all kinds of executives at companies that are spectacular at their jobs until the organization changes and they get a different role. Then what they are good at may no longer be what the company needs. The choice then is to let them work in an area that sets them up for failure and hurts the company at the same time, wait for them to learn their new job, or to replace them with a different specialist who is good at what the company needs now. Two reasons why executives get paid so highly: 1) There are not many people available who can do what they do. Decision makers for billion dollar companies are not sitting around at the unemployment office or reading the classified ads looking for work. Try making complex million dollar decisions all day every day with a bewildering amount of information quickly thrown at you and see how your stress levels work out. 2) People of that level are always at risk of being unemployed if the organization changes or even sometimes by doing their job. A turn-around specialist has no use in a company after he has already turned the company around. I suspect that these individuals who are being "let go" from Sprint were good at something other than what Spring needs now. Maybe this will stop the behavior where Sprint spent a fortune blanketing the airwaves for the "New Sprint Network" in Chicago when at that same time, data did not work at all in the downtown area because of spectrum capacity and hand-offs of voice calls between towers in the suburbs were still dropping calls. Many people in Chicago joined Sprint based on the marketing, found that the "New Sprint Network" did not work for them where they needed it to work and returned to the Sprint store to demand their money back never to return. That marketing decision alone should have got some people fired.

All network connections are throttled when they are maxed out. They only allow the maximum amount of data that can fit through all the parts of the network that the data is attempting to travel through. Excess traffic is rejected and backs off to try again later. This causes slowdowns. The problem is that when the back haul or wireless bandwidth is all in use, the users that are consuming the most get backed off a little and those who are using very little bandwidth are backed off by roughly the same amount. The net effect is those users who are using very little bandwidth appear to have their speeds cut to very slow speeds until the network adjusts. If for example a user is streaming Netflix at 4MB/s and the network connection saturates, Netflix will attempt to continue sending data at 4MB/s until it realizes that it has to slow down. Meanwhile a user attempting to view a simple webpage will request the page and the page contents get caught up in the 4MB/s Netflix data trying to get through a network connection that cannot handle it all. There are solutions to this problem that most providers of network services use, they are generally quality of service, traffic priority levels, bandwidth limits and bandwidth caps. You can see this in effect on a Sprint site that is slow, sometimes you can still stream Pandora over it. This is because on some sites, streaming audio appears to be prioritized over users accessing web pages. Sprint is likely testing bandwidth limits on streaming video on some sites. We shall see what other parts of this Sprint uses to manage their maxed out sites.