irev210

More details would be helpful - as tongboy mentioned you should easily be able to get 99 cent devices. I have the same question for both of you - after all of the recent updates, how are you liking Sprint Direct Connect? How does it compare to iDEN and other PTT solutions?

Same things we already know on S4GRU. http://www.anandtech...torola-photon-q I wish anand knew how many sites still needed to be upgraded in the market. I am sure the market will be a lot different once they actually upgrade 75+% of the "towers".

Sprint and Clearwire had an interesting discussion of how their new network would integrate. They seem pleased that there were formal 3GPP standards that allowed for "mock" sites allowing a clearwire site to look like a sprint site. I don't really understand the technical aspects but it seemed like as far as network, hand-offs, and all other things that would seem to be a problem with two separate networks are gone (so they say). webcast: http://cc.talkpoint.com/well001/071812a_hr/?entity=1_X5JEDJ6 It's pretty interesting - did you get a chance to listen to it?

I am sure sprint is drooling at the opportunity to increase the number of "bars". There are so many people that I've talked to that think having a voice call with 5-6 bars vs. 1-2 bars is a big deal to them. They are afraid the call will drop. How will Sprint decide to select which band a user will connect to LTE? It seems like that should be a much more elegant solution.

It also makes a lot of sense when there is say, a giant wind storm or another event that causes the downtilt to change. Instead of having to send someone up the tower, you can just adjust it remotely and have a field engineer on the ground test coverage. This seems like a huge advantage over legacy equipment, I am surprised that sprint has never mentioned this. Do other carriers deploy this?

I think everyone is for competition. In many senses, why would anyone invest resources into innovating when samsung would have free reign to copy those features? If it is ok for samsung to copy, why wouldn't everyone else? And if everyone else copied, apple couldn't/wouldn't invest in developing new groundbreaking devices (nor would google or microsoft). The design patents are really hard to rule on (in my opinion) but the utility patents are much more black and white. Take for example, the iconic coca-cola bottle patent - you can't copy that but at what point are you not copying? Your comparison of Chrysler copying Bentley is another great example - there is a gray line where it would be infringement. I think Samsung tried to take it to the edge on trying to emulate the successful features that were found on the iPhone. They probably wanted to push it but ended up going too far. How can you read this and say this is samsung being competitive? http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/102317767?access_key=key-o1nfmlft8am5nw1qlpr Instead of showing iPhone features and how to improve on them, it's "this is how iPhone does it, we'll do it this way too." It would have been pretty awesome if all of us nerds could have been in the courtroom listening to the whole trial - we could have a much better discussion about protecting innovation vs. stifling innovation.

When I first posted the downtilt, I was hoping someone that was more educated in the field would take a look, glad you did It's really cool. I wonder how much Sprint is currently messing with downlilt. Will coverage "evolve" as network vision deployment progresses? Will they actively adjust each tower as they upgrade towers around it? Just interesting that this has never been brought up before.

WiMAX is TDD vs. Sprint's FD-LTE WiMAX shares the same spectrum for upload and download. You can change the ratio of "upload to download" so you can get more upload speeds but you take away from download when you do that. AJ can probably explain in much more detail (or google) but that is the gist.

With free roaming, it makes sense that Sprint has the best coverage. So, from a coverage perspective, it makes sense.

Sorry, it was a poor attempt at sarcasm by me. There are something like 85,500 search results on duplicate text message problems between 1/1/2005 and 1/1/2010 (well before anything network vision). Verizon: 6,890 AT&T: 8,780 T-Moble: 259,000

Do radios care about channel width? If the radio supports four carrier cards can it be 4*10x10 carriers? Also, what about aggregation? Say, like clearwire, can they aggregate 20+20 over one carrier card? jefball99 asked some good questions!

The coolest part is, you can do the prepaid route via SIM and BYOD. Great if you live in an area that has great T-Mobile coverage. I've been tempted to get an unlocked GS3 and buy a no contract T-Mobile sim just to play around with it.

Heh, did you click the link?

Sprint NEVER had a duplicate txt problem before network vision... that's why when you search "Sprint duplicate text messages" between 1/1/2005 and 1/1/2010 there are zero results from google. https://www.google.c...2F1%2F2010&tbm=

If I had a dollar for ever post on how "this time, I got good information from a sprint rep." Usually posts like that are followed by "I am tired of being lied to by Sprint." It's sort of sad. It reminds me of the wimax days where "I got this magical information from a sprint rep that wimax is coming soon to my area." While I hope LA gets LTE soon, I think you were being fed a very "optimistic" scenario.

Just never heard sprint was using this with network vision. Pretty cool they can remotely change coverage.

Remote Electrical Tilt? Sounds fancy...

Ah, gotcha. Makes sense. I did some interesting tests comparing unloaded EVDO rev A vs. eHRPD in the Boston thread with speed tests and traceroutes. You might want to check it out if you are interested. I would ignore anything Sprint reps have to say and just stick with S4GRU, heh.

I believe it... 16mbit seems to be about the max clearwire's wimax will do from my personal experience.

So this is proof that eHRPD does not get any faster speeds. Believe it or not, this is, in general, faster than I have been getting the past 4-6 months. I was getting 'no data connection'- about 0.01 or 0.02mbps 3G or 1X in my area ever since the 'Network Vision' started going on out here. The past several weeks now I have also been experiencing a flood of duplicate texts (also from Network Vision upgrades they said). Robert has done a good job of explaining that eHRPD doesn't mean faster data speeds... it just means that you are being routed through new Sprint "4g cores" or sprints new "switches". The fact is, that tower hasn't seen any backhaul and/or increase in carriers, so you have the same bottleneck. In some markets, people have noticed that where the legacy 3G switches were overloaded, switching to the newer 4G switches yielded faster speeds. Network vision is under way in the LA market, but it takes time. Even after they install a new base station, new radios, etc, you still need the backhaul to arrive before you will see the improved speeds. Once the backhaul arrives, it's like a switch gets flipped and you will go from nothing to 1.5mbit+.

While us techies love more choice... I think it comes down to product placement. Moto/Sprint wants to go after the QWERTY niche with this phone. If they came out with a non-QWERTY version, they would not only canibalize the QWERTY Photon-Qwerty but sales of other sprint phones (GS3, EVO 4G LTE). I am sure there is a lot that goes into pricing (need to order at least x million units) so volumes would be very important to each handset line.

For what it is worth (probably not much) but I read a report saying 2dB from Sprint installing new/modern antennas + 3dB from Sprint switching to RRU's.

Well said. Sort of strange someone would say that Sprint making steady progress deploying LTE in the Boston market is "nonsense". bostonsprintguy: bars have nothing to do with your LTE connection anyway, they are completely meaningless when looking at LTE signal. Bars map to CDMA voice, not LTE. Considering how far along Sprint is in Boston, in a market they haven't even announced, things seem pretty good for us.

Have you tried toggling from CDMA/LTE to CDMA and back to CDMA/LTE to see if you gain eHRPD?

I think Sprint decided to sell the iPhone because it made more financial sense for them to sell it vs. not selling it. If you look at the financials, they didn't really "give the farm" to sell the iPhone. The sell through only has to be 35% or so for Sprint to meet the contractual commitment to apple. Something that, so far, has been easy for them to do. Frankly, apple would be stupid not to require a minimum sell through - they did the same thing with Verizon. You need commitments from your customer for a number of reasons (logistics, advertising, design, manufacturing etc). I wish I saved it, but I had an interesting chart modeling the value of a Sprint iPhone customer vs. a standard Sprint smartphone customer. Needless to say, the iPhone customer is much more profitable.