richy
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Everything posted by richy
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http://shop.sprint.com/mysprint/services_solutions/details.jsp?detId=tv&catId=service_ready_now&catName=Ready+Now&detName=Sprint+TV&specialCat=#!/ I remember this from when I was a sprint sub about 5 years ago. Tmobile was not the first to do this, and they did it with their own product not other peoples. A little objectivity required here people Yes what tmobile is doing is questionable but they are not alone and others have done worse before them. You are entirely correct, this will also work in court. This is also why we need to drown lawyers. They have managed to utterly destroy the intent of the legislation without actually breaking it. Go team
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It would be incredibly difficult for sprint or tmobile to become #1. It would basically require them to exceed verizon on coverage while still offering more for less, then both companies would have to overcome peoples previous impressions. Verizon and AT&T have phenomenally low churn rates, basically very loyal customers. Tmobile has some momentum and they have managed to significantly increase their subscriber base, but they had huge amounts of underutilized midband spectrum and a pile of money and spectrum from the failed at&t merger and then additional subs from the metropcs merger. From now onward it will be harder for them. They need spectrum, which means cash to buy and roll out. They need to expand their macro site network coverage while densifying areas already covered. They have some momentum and public opinion but that is fragile. Sprint just needs to deploy what it has, which it now certainly seems to be doing and it has another plan for increasing the scope and density of their network. It needs to turn around public opinion but tmo has proven there are a huge number of people who will switch back and forth. To become number 1 they need an image that will lure verizons best customers away, Sprint can do this where tmobile can't. Sprint always had a more professional image than tmobile, but I feel they did suffer badly over the past 5-6 years and get left behind. Legere capitalized on this. Now NV is pretty much done it should be quicker for them to roll out updates to the network, that was always the argument, that NV sites would be future proofed and easy to upgrade. Sprint will be able to quickly add extra carriers and upgrade backhaul. They stand a chance to changing their image but we now need to see them accelerate. The lastest offer from tmo of extra money to lure specifically sprint subs is exactly what is wrong with the industry. Sprint and tmobile can coexist, taking shots at each other just allows the big two more chance to pull away. Tmo is by far the worst but not the only one, they both need to focus on challenging the duopoly and not fighting each other. Hell if they had any sense they would team up to cover areas where neither of them have coverage. It would make it more economical to cover very rural areas. Set it up as a third company with ownership shared and run it as a non profit. just my 2 magentan cents
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The site by DT, you mean the one in the parking lot up by sanseis? Yeah thats a short pole right now. Its great facing up north and makai but sadly doesnt get back behind the hill down towards napili. Napili area is served by the royal kahana site I think which is awaiting a permit. Lets hope they get that done as with their spectrum they will be in a killer position. They have the potential to deliver a faster service to a wider area than even verizon (should they get a couple of sites in east maui). I was shocked how bad verizon is here for speed, they have reasonable coverage unless you are travelling to or from east maui. I love how their map just totally lies about coverage out north and by kaupo. When your map makes tmos look accurate you have issues.
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Great news! Both sprints coverage map and sensorly show no lte in lahaina so thats great news if they have turned it up on lahaina shores (next to 505 front street, the shops you mentioned). A friend insisted we meet for a drink at fleetwoods about 4 months ago and his sprint phone had no lte. They only really need to upgrade the royal kahana site and they have covered most of the west side. I was watching permits a couple of years ago, are they still using roger alworth for their designer for most stuff? I can try help keep track with you.
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You get 40mbps in Lahaina? Theres no LTE on sprint in Lahaina according to sprint. Did they turn the tower up on the shores? I hope so as they really needed to cover lahaina and napili to properly serve west maui. Their map is still showing they only converted the one tower up by the suites so only kaanapali \ honokowai got lte service.
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Plus here theres usually someone with an answer like AJ. What lots of people fail to recognize is that their experience doesn't reflect everyone elses. I have an experience of tmo and sprint that is diametrically opposed to yours, but both are totally valid, we live in different places. Thankfully s4gru is an oasis of sense on the internet, and a rare one at that.
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Just another reason I don't go visit all you city folk Plus you aren't even safe in Panda these days. The congested upload is a weird one. With the exception of volte use is wildly asymmetrical, even with the efficiency of the upload link not being as high there should still be a massive disparity between the amount of free capacity on upload and download links. An upload link being congested without a congested download is very weird indeed. Perhaps everyone uploading video to mauiwatch at the same time?
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yeah usps seems to be one of the best out there for price and service, really nice staff round these parts as well!
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Shoots, queen k? That's all the way over in the city tmo is poor beyond belief there but has been for a few years. West maui is far better, just waiting for sprint to being some more lte love over here. Central maui, south maui and even some upcountry got some love, kihei even got spark, but west maui got a single site upgraded. There's basically no lte from the pali up past wahikuli / Lei alii which is weird. They covered Kaanapali and that's pretty much it. Hopefully they will come back and upgrade some more.
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That central maui, thats pretty fast for tmo in central maui. I was agreeing with you but that its the opposite on west Maui. You can normally hit 15+mbps at peak times on west maui, lucky to hit a tenth of that in central maui at peak times. Just as Oahu is different to 'maui' maui itself is different west to central. It will be interesting to see how sprints network develops here.
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Agreed that location matters, west maui is the opposite of central maui in that respect. Tmo most is pretty fast (for a 10x10), or rather its not overloaded, apart from maybe 1 area just past KOR.
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I've had that a couple of times coming out here on UPS recently. Plus their guaranteed 48 hours was always 3-4 days. They have always been better than fedex though. Fedex once delivered an $8k camera to another house a mile away because it was friday afternoon and **** it I cant be bothered driving that far out etc so I'll just ask this other guy to hold it for a 'neighbor'. Then there was the time they told me to get my ****ing boxes off their van. Not much love for fedex here lol but yeah, welcome to maui lol
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http://www.rootmetrics.com/us/rsr/honolulu-hi/2015/2H This is a pretty poor representation of an entire state. They basically drove around downtown honolulu and then took the main tourist road out to the dole plantation and turned around. They didn't even make it over the pali. I'd never really looked at the maps before, would have been nice to see them cover at least one island entirely or even just all the main roads, let alone cover more than Oahu. If this is how it is nation wide than their reports are pretty worthless. Is this deliberate or just being cheap? -
That isn't their style, they would charge a premium and make certain features only available on their network. Plus of course their MHz would be better than anyone elses, especially since they invented cellular phones.
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The reasons I asked are basically because you had posted a few different numbers (my apologies if it came across as confrontational, it wasn't intended) and also because a 15mbps wouldn't really achieve a change in network load but would introduce a differentiator between tmo and say verizon, something big red can throw at them in commercials. The objective of bingeon was to reduce network load whilst hopefully scoring a PR win, appearing to offer more for free while not leaving an avenue open for competitors to slam them (which a rate limit would). What they managed to do, which is quite clever, is to rate limit video streams without providing a single number that could be used again them, genius, evil genius but still pretty damn smart. They have been deliberately vague, there is no specific mbps cap, no actual resolution cap either, it says it won't drop below 480p, but may stream above that. Most likely it won't be above 480p unless there is plenty of spare capacity on a cell. I'll give it to them, they managed to cap streams without providing much ammunition to competitors. Evil, but bloody well played! Capping an individual phone at 15mbps wouldn't actually change any usage. It would mean a file download takes longer but doesn't reduce the amount downloaded. Bingeon actually lowers the rate of a stream which reduces the total amount of data downloaded. 15mbps is pretty high, enough for 4k easily, especially with h265. H264 wouldn't be very good 4k but a decent encoder would reduce artifacts at the expense of detail which you wouldnt notice anyway on a 6 inch 4k screen. 720p is pretty much the most you would need on any screen, no matter what the resolution, below 8 inches and thats coming from a photo and video nut who loves shiny toys. A 15mbps limit would hurt tmobile image wise without providing any upside. Any limit would need to be low enough to impact usage, say 2mbps which would not play well on TV. On digging deeper into how this works there is one big danger, not so much NN but codec neutrality. Notice how google services arent included, youtube etc, this is partially due to how the stream tagging works but also because of the codecs they use. It MAY be that tmobile want and need h264 and h265 (which are commercially licenced) whereas google also uses their free vp8/9 codecs as well. We really do not want to see the world pushed onto one type of commercial codec, no matter how good it is.
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600 MHz auction results posted and transition schedule
richy replied to ericdabbs's topic in General Topics
http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/chamath-palihapitiya-wants-bid-billions-600-mhz-incentive-auction-challenge/2015-11-11 They cannot be serious right? They must have very deep pockets, to take away enough spectrum then build out a nation wide network will take tens of billions, even with collocating on towers (where they will probably find themselves pretty low down on the tower). Spectrum grab? Given the time gap between the auction and the spectrum being usable they wont see any return on a huge investment for a long time. Theres a thin line between genius and insanity and it seems someone is using that line to dry their socks on. -
Are you arbitrarily picking numbers? 720p30 which is about the most you realistically need for a sub 7 inch screen can be happily served by a sub 2mbps connection, this should drop for most content types as h265 becomes better supported by hardware (something pretty much happening now). Theres no need for 4k video on mobile, nothing you do should need more than 4mbps per stream (tethering can result in multiple streams per cellular device). For better or worse peak speeds is the current wang waving contest all 4 carriers are engaged in, as ridiculous as it is I doubt we will see them move away. Some prepaid carriers already offer rate limited lte, if they brought it to postpaid then they lose another differentiation. I checked with online chat and they said 2 for 100 remains the same price which is weird. They continue to try and push people towards metered plans while raising the price on those metered plans (to drive arpu up). All the time they are forcing the big two to reduce per gb pricing. That gap is closing and they are shooting themselves in the feet, the closer they all get the more the tide will reverse. Interesting times! I dont use huge amounts of data (4gb last cycle) but have done and probably will do every now and again, bill security is nice, but the more they bump it without tangible increases in coverage the less attractive they are. It will be interesting to see how this affects portion ratios. A $15 bump is pretty high, I wonder how much stick and how much carrot is in our future.
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Sadly virtually everything causes confusion for the average consumer lol. Calling abroad and calling from abroad has always been a mine field. I have relatives abroad and travel, it's always involved some level of research. I settled for a skype account with a global calling plan for years then tmo introduced a $5 a month unlimited calling plan for the countries I wanted so that was a no brainer. What remains to be seen is how long tmo will tolerate the plans they used to attract people in, they are already bumping up prices. Have to be careful though as the cheaper verizon gets per GB and the more expensive tmo gets per month the less incentive there is to stay with tmo. Word on here is that sprint is starting to show us some lte love here as well so they are back in contention as well. I know there is a lot of contention over tmo, not everything they are doing is great, but we have two companies in the market who are shaking things up and some of the ideas may miss but overall I feel sprint and tmobile have done a lot of good over the past 3 years.
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Ok, I agree with most of your post, but this? You are complaining that they made some countries free. You didn't track your usage before? The only difference now is that when you look up the cost for some countries it is free. When travelling or calling abroad I always checked up on the prices to prevent surprises, some of them are just free now which is hard to interpret as a bad thing.
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#FreeCandyRocks #SayYestotheScaryMan OK already Maybe you are right. A little bit.
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Don't worry, you'll get used to me disappointing you, everyone does eventually I'm struggling to see how this could be construed as discriminatory if it includes any video service that signs up, signup being free and there being no bar to entry. A startup offering vod from a vps could sign up, how quickly they got accepted remains to be seen but both ends probably need to consent to having their content downgraded in quality. Net Neutrality mostly stemmed from paying for a fast lane, although admittedly it did include zero rating where specific companies could pay to have their data zero rated. That isn't the case here, there is no fee, nor is any fast lane being used, I guess technically it is the opposite as the quality is downgraded but again, both parties are consenting. NN was also largely about interconnect fees vs peering and how last mile providers (frequently TV providers) with a conflict of interest could use interconnect or transit fees to push up the cost of VOD services while effectively giving it free to themselves and equalizing the cost against their linear services. While I would imagine Netflix et al probably do cache on tmos network (and probably sprints if they have sense) this isn't about fast lanes, transit, peering or anything like that. No small or large provider pays anything, they fill out a form. Now why video is free but say ftp transfers aren't when a GB is a GB is a valid discussion, but again this is for free and allowing a user to stream any vod service that applies for free doesn't harm a cat lover website or facebook or whoever else is on the interweb. The whole thing might not look right but I really dont see a huge amount of harm in this. Remember Sprint DID zero rate their own tv streaming service while charging for others. I don't recall them being pilloried for it I really do struggle to see the harm here. Is it really because one type of data is getting preference over another? Because any sane network management plan has done that for years, your email can wait half a second if it means your skype call doesn't skip. Recently sprint got a bashing for the leasing deal, unjustly especially as it was only an option, I think tmo are getting the same here, its more for free, the cost isn't passed to the other end, the trade off is clear and its optional. Just because its come from justin biebers dirty uncle doesn't always mean its bad Then again I am hardly immune from being wrong lol. The biggest worry here is how their network will stand up to the abuse.
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Absolutely the opposite. Zero rating is only an issue if it's pay to play or discriminatory against a specific company. There is zero harm if a provider offers free interconnects to any company offering a type of service that submits their details (in this case ip ranges and ports). If tmobile allowed their own service or a partners service for free then charged a prohibitive sum for transit to a competitors then that would be a violation but the free music and video streaming is neutral. To be fair sprint had its own tv service which it zero rated as well. The verge is as usual portraying it's sub soccer mom level grasp of technology. Their comments about artificial scarcity, so you agree that sprint have been slow at expanding their network capacity? No, they have gone as quickly as their pretty impressive Capex spend can allow (tmo and sprint seem to spend about 4-5bn a year on networks, verizon 12bn and att in between the two figures). I wouldn't call that dragging their heels. The big two have used pricing to constrain demand somewhat but sprint and tmo have not. Buying a nationwide 5x5 and deploying it is billions, easily over 10bn, not something you can just do whenever, especially as auctions are not an everyday occurance. The data crunch had been very real, even verizon here is only just starting to get away from being congested. I'm sure their click baiting got them some ad revenue but their waffling doesn't stand up to any scrutiny.
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Wow glad to see nobody let it upset them Bingeon is optional. If you want unlimited streaming it's 480p (or higher), probably depending on network congestion. 720 p is more than enough for any mobile screen, 480p isn't bad, the codec and encoder are more important. I'm shocked anyone can do a better job than netflix, they spent a fortune developing their encoder (buying companies to help) so honestly I think this probably just makes lower resolutions more tolerable or is just throttling. This does mean the kids can watch stuff on tablets in the car via tethering which is useful at times. The way they sell it is pathetic, but it is extra choice. It will be very interesting to see if network congestion improves (due to lower streaming rates) or worsens (due to more people streaming). If nothing else it will be interesting to see if either of the big two respond in any way. Plus my tethering allowance just doubled. Let's see if the bill changes lol
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I'd love to see them push fast and hard, set some big targets with close deadlines and go all out to hit them. It won't be cheap but it would be good to see them over deliver. I don't think they need a Legere (I'm hoping only one exists) but it would be great to see a consistent experience across their footprint. I have no doubt that sprint as a whole is unrecognizable compared to a few years ago but they left gaps in their upgrades. If I had a phone from each tier one carrier in my hand now only one wouldn't have an lte signal. They have worked wonders doing as much as they have but let's luck it up another notch. Fill the holes and expand the footprint. 2.4G is such a boon, get it out there, get 2 or 3 carriers nearly everywhere and kick some ass.
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Feeling sorry for sprint they offer choice and people get pissy about it. Yes they borrowed it from tmobile but I doubt tmo invented it. In the dark ages you hit you allowance and then just got charged more, these days you can choose a plan that just slows you down rather than charging you more (while still being able to pay overages if you want to go that route). You can also get unlimited data that when you hit a pseudo arbitrary limit you get deprioratized on congested sites. Again, nothing is being forced, just more options. Yet people still complain? Some folks just don't deserve nice things. They are begging to be screwed over by the big two. I'll give tmo one thing, they have managed to position themselves as a popular underdog and the media seems to be perpetuating that, sprint on the other hand seems to attract more than its fair share of criticism. The underdog they like to kick. People are fickle and media respond to that thank god for t/s4gru!
