irev210

Here are my thoughts on T-Mobile, now that I have had them for a month (in Boston, MA). Coverage: Compared to Sprint, it is mixed. Sprint has no coverage where I live because they skimped out on placing a tower in a very busy square (even clearwire did not skimp out on coverage in this area). This was the original reason why I wanted to try T-Mobile. In most other places, other than where I live, Sprint's coverage seems to be better. On the MBTA subway, T-Mobile has coverage but for whatever reason, it's broken. I don't know why they won't fix it. It's like the backhaul went down and T-Mobile has just ignored it. I have great signal, locked onto HSPA+, but no connectivity. Data: In downtown Boston, T-Mobile's DC-HSPA+ carrier is overloaded. Switching to their PCS HSPA+ carrier is fast as heck. I don't know how to force it to stay on PCS band, so most of the time my speeds are 1-3mbit downtown. About 3 miles away from downtown, speeds fly at around 15-20mbit. Everywhere else, it is pretty hit or miss. It's great or it simply doesn't work. I prefer Sprint's slow and steady approach. Customer service: I'll keep this quick. Sprint's is better. Voice quality: It's very good. I think it is roughly on-par with sprint. I think for $30/month, it is a VERY attractive proposition - especially if you live near a major city, like I do.

I wouldn't look at either one. The galaxy nexus has horrible battery life and a horrible radio. The GS2 is just old at this point. Have you thought about the samsung victory? Those go for a penny on wireless.amazon.com and elsewhere. That's my vote for low cost + good battery life + good reception. If you can get a deal on the GS3 or the EVO 4G LTE, those are better choices.

Considering the 12-24" of snow coming tomorrow... I am guessing most NV crews will be huddled in doors over the next few days.

Much agreed. They have some issues with indoor coverage, but that will be addressed once they refarm ESMR. Even before Nextel, I had sprint in the late 90's and early 2000's. I never remember having issues with coverage and I spent a lot of time in all of southern orange county. I think it's a tough area to cover. The geography is very mixed and there are no high-rise buildings to utilize. How many years did you say it took for Sprint to build out that tower over by pyramid lake in LA?

The American way is to enjoy being ignorant. When you are afraid of change, you look for reasons why change is bad. Confirmation bias + ignorance = America #1!!!!

It is a mini cellphone tower for your home. You do not need sprint coverage around your home, it is not a booster, it's an actual "tower". Did you call the dedicated airave support line at 866-556-7310? Do you have it hooked up per the instructions (directly into your cable modem)?

Very true. I heard a great story about how a local town had some new high voltage power lines run by the town's high school. After the lines were installed, the town demanded a meeting with the power company. People, one by one, stood up in the gymnasium speaking about all of the issues that happened to students since the power lines were installed (poor sleep, poor grades, ADHD, blah blah blah). After everyone was done speaking, a representative from the power company apologized for all of the issues people had but politely explained that while the power lines were installed, they had yet to transmit any power over the lines. Absolutely comical.

These were the good 'ol days I miss the days of having a sprint antenna outside my bedroom window... Nowadays, at my new home, I bounce between a few different towers and am lucky to get coverage at all. It's depressing.

There is a hilarious one off the 22 fwy where there are about 4 cell towers right at the 22/5 and one is a faux palm tree while the others are just standard towers. Just cracked me up.

The title of your thread is a little misleading. I haven't heard about any sites in orange county that are not getting converted to LTE. The biggest issue is suburban sprawl. You are right, nobody is going to want a cell tower in their backyard of a giant master planned community. It's particularly annoying in places like orange county because a planned community can be very large. If you live in the middle of one of these communities, coverage, regardless of carrier, will be problematic. It has nothing to do with the city but people just don't want a booming tower in the middle of their cookie cutter housing development. At the end of the day, it is peoples choice to live in these large communities with no cell coverage. He is wrong about coverage though. With sprint deploying CDMA 1x Advanced voice and LTE on 800MHz ESMR (old nextel spectrum), coverage in south orange county will improve significantly. I don't really think Sprint coverage is all that bad in Orange County.

It's the same thing in Boston. Sprint has roughly a dozen 4G sites live in the City of Boston out of roughly 100 sites, yet Sprint marketing officially launches Boston. Outside of Boston, Sprint has made much better progress. As others have said, it isn't really a network vision issue - they are deploying where it is easiest to first. It's really a sprint marketing issue.

You realize that he was using a a setup that was better than the standard wimax equipment that is elsewhere, right? More antennas, wider channel, bigger backhaul.

I don't think so. You are operating under the assumption that each evo uses the exact same components. My bone stock EVO 4G LTE can't run nav, it crashes. I tried a factory refresh RUU and it didn't fix. I know 4 people with evo, 2 people have problems since the update, two people don't. All are stock, non-rooted. All worked perfect prior to JB update. My guess is that HTC uses different component vendors for some part that has a bad driver and makes nav crash - dunno though. If I run non-JB, no nav crash. Sounds like a software issue to me :-/

He really screwed up on Sprint. Frankly, his lack of technical knowledge always bothered me. If you don't know the technical stuff and just wanna work the numbers, fine... but don't act like you do. Stick to what you know.

I know on my nexus 4 the google hotspot works fine out of the box. No special hotspot plan is required with the nexus, just counts against my 5gb plan. On verizon, I know you can put any sim into a ipad/mifi and have it work just fine with a phone plan but haven't tried on T-Mobile. What sort of nag screen do you get?

You can't just stick the sim into your ipad or aircard? Isn't the plan attached to the SIM and not the device?

It does temporarily but it reverts to AWS randomly. I can tell the difference in speedtest because DC-HSPA+ is reported as "cell" while HSPA+ is reported as "hspa".

Get on the 5GB 30 dollar prepaid plan, much better value. I see the EXACT same thing in Boston. The DC-HSPA+ carrier is completely loaded and I get 1-3mbit down vs. the HSPA+ carrier on PCS I FLY at over 10mbit. I am frustrated because I have no idea how to make the nexus 4 stick only on PCS. For uploads on t-mobile, I can't get over 3.6mbit, ever. Faster downloads on DC-HSPA+ have been about 28mbit. My only solution so far is to get a HTC DNA

Yup, the whole point is to setup a framework for the future. Not just promise me today, buy Huawei/ZTE tomorrow.

I really hope they fixed navigation. Very annoying bug.

Technically, the Boston market is all of Massachusetts... however sprint marketing launched Boston proper - not 30 minutes outside of Boston in the Boston suburbs (though they may have, they've launched a few markets outside of the City of Boston. I think Sprint has done a fantastic job in Mass - I just take issue with the way Sprint's marketing team is handling the launches. For example, in downtown boston, there are about 3 live LTE sites out of over a dozen. I think marketing is just sending the wrong expectations. Sadly, I feel like they are doing it to tell investors, not help customers, which annoys me.

I don't really see room for four major mobile OS providers. MSFT has enough money to throw at windows mobile to eventually make it stick. I see enterprise preferring MSFT due to security/updates/support for many years and exchange/office integration.

So, I was sort of surprised to see Sprint's marketing team "launch" Boston. 4G sites in the City of Boston = ~13 Total sprint sites in the City of Boston = ~94 "Launching" a market with 14% of your sites upgraded to 4G LTE does nothing but confuse customers about what service they should expect. The soft launch was fine, just let people use it as it gets better and better so people don't develop an expectation that this is actually a 4G market. The pace in Boston is pretty decent now. Wait 3 more months and do it right... Frankly, you are better off launching the entire state of Massachusetts if your marketing team is going to go that route... but that's just my humble opinion.

Writing be darned, it's a slide show. This shows the sad state of journalism in our country.

It will get approved but they need to detail what steps sprint/softbank will do in the security agreement. Softbank does have a lot of chinese telecom equipment installed - this was one of the ways that they were able to undercut the traditional telecoms in japan (that used NEC and other japanese infrastructure). Back in october, Bloomberg did note that Huawei might come up... http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-18/huawei-may-surface-in-u-s-review-of-softbank-sprint-deal.html