JPSmith

Voice coverage is good, 3G data speeds are all over the place, I see anywhere from 100 kbps to 1 Mbps, mostly in the 100-300 range, higher only late at night and away from the U of I campus. On campus during the school year you are lucky to get 100 kbps much of the time. And this is improved from a year or two ago; Sprint has added some data capacity at most towers but it is still far short of sufficient. There is no 4G yet (Wimax never made it here).

Any news or info about NV in Champaign/Urbana? All I know is that 3G data speeds here are somewhat better than 6-12 months ago, but still not great. I'm still using my ol' faithful HTC Arrive... I like Windows Phone and was waiting for the WP8 devices on Sprint, now the dilemma is whether to grab an Ativ S Neo or wait for dual/triband LTE phones.

Living in Champaign this deal sounds great to me. Sprint is quite spectrum-constrainted in many of the former iPCS markets and this seems to address that. More spectrum in Chicago can only be a good thing as well.

You were not experiencing NV. As is documented elsewhere on this site, the Chicago metro NV deployment started in the far outer suburbs and is working its way inwards; it probably won't reach the center of the city until late summer or fall.

Sorry, didn't mean to quote myself.

There is easily room for three major OS in the consumer smartphone space, it's a huge and rapidly growing market. Blackberry has lost the consumer market and is having increasing trouble retaining corporate customers due to the improved security features of the other players (and the fact that people don't like carrying two devices). If Microsoft can keep developer momentum going I believe Windows Phone will take over the #3 spot pretty quickly. My Arrive has been the best smartphone experience I've ever had, I actually have less problems with it than my wife does with her iPhone 4s and far less issues than with Android devices I've used.

If there is no existing tower to work from, and the location is urban or suburban, it can take years or be virtually impossible to get a new tower built; local government approval is required and there are typically endless rounds of deliberations and public hearings which often generate NIMBY opposition from people who live near the proposed tower site. In my community, attempts by AT&T and T-Mobile to erect new towers have gone down in flames in the past few years.

Bingo. Sprint hyped the EVO and similar devices knowing they used many times more data than dumbphones and did not rmove quickly enough to ramp up data capacity. You could argue that it was impossible to forsee how quickly customers would move from dumbphones to smart devices in 2010/2011. But having seen what AT&T went through with the iPhone, Sprint should have had plans in place to react faster when it became apparent this was happening.

Keeping the current 4 and 4s in production, unchanged, when the iP5 comes out would be consistent with past Apple practice. The interesting question as raised by S4GRU is whether Apple will introduce an LTE phone in the iP4/s form factor alongside the (presumably) larger form factor of the iP5. Besides the extra antenna, the other technical issue with putting LTE in the iP4/s would be battery life; I'm not sure how much progress is being made in reducing power consumption of LTE radios but iP5 (again assuming it will be larger) would accomodate a larger battery while the iP4 would not.

Two iphone lines is an interesting idea, but I agree it would be really really tough to add LTE to the 4s form factor. Apple will not compromise on antennas after the iphone 4 debacle.

Well yes, but improved 3G will matter a lot to anyone in the early NV markets who upgraded within the last year, especially in non-Wimax areas. That's a lot of people.

I just hope Sprint doesn't skew the upgrades mostly towards LTE for marketing reasons at the expense of achieving really good 3G over their entire footprint. I can't think of anything I care to do on my phone that doesn't work perfectly well with consistent 1 Mbps download speed. Given the paucity of LTE devices in the near term and their battery life issues, I'll take solid 3G over spotty 4G for the time being.

Awesome, thanks much for the info.

I recall from the days of iPCS/Sprint squabbling that iPCS didn't have much PCS spectrum in many of its markets. E.g. this filing http://www.secinfo.com/d11MXs.uJer.htm indicates they held as little as 10 mhz of spectrum in a number of areas, including sizable cities like Peoria. I was wondering how this spectrum situation will affect NV in the former affiliate markets, both availability of LTE and overall capacity expansion. I assume that the PCS spectrum iPCS controlled in these markets is all that Sprint has to work with now, at least until iDEN spectrum is re-purposed? Does this mean that some of these markets can't get the full NV treatment or may still have capacity issues post-NV? Might this lead Sprint to accelerate the de-commissioning of iDEN in these markets? Sorry if this is a naive question.

I assumed "sofware defined radio" meant a single physical radio that can do either Wimax or LTE depending on programming. I thought this was different from "dual Wimax/LTE chips" which I assume have separate physical Wimax and LTE radios. Guess I don't understand the technology.

Do you know if these new devices will be able to access both Wimax and LTE simultaneously? Or will it be only one or the other, i.e. buy device with Wimax support, upgrade to LTE later but lose access to Wimax?

Thanks for the info, good to hear that relief should be coming to C-U by the end of this year.

Great site! Bob, do you have any info or hunches on what is happening / going to happen in the Champaign-Urbana market? My Sprint download speeds here recently spiked to 1-2 Mbps for a couple of weeks, up from the usual 50-200 kbps. I saw this at my home in southwest Champaign, my office in Rantoul and all along I-57 in between. Then after this nice taste of decent 3G, speeds dropped back down to more or less the previous level he past couple of days. Was wondering if this was somehow connected to the activity in Chicago. C-U isn't considered part of the Chicago market but I'm hoping it will get upgraded soon!