dkyeager

lol. The other middle. Perhaps LTE 750 (700 c 10x10 from the PRWireless PR, LLC deal, dba Open Mobile) like Verizon -- 700 a used by T-Mobile elsewhere (different bands). Sprint also has enough 800 for only 1x800. References: http://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/UlsSearch/licenseMap.jsp?licKey=3069548 http://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/UlsSearch/licenseMap.jsp?licKey=1935940

Time only resets with CDMA iirc. Thus if you are only on LTE roaming, time will drift.

I believe your 100Mb is the limits of the plan, ie 100MB for most, 300MB for ED1500, and 800MB for some very old SERO plans. This limit would also apply to Verizon and I think to some independent roaming sites. All of these are individual deals so if the phone shows roaming I would assume it is going against your roaming allowance.

The roaming aspect may be one reason T-Mobile is talking about keeping the Sprint brand around. Sprint and T-Mobile also have a significant number of dissatisfied customers of the other carrier. Over time I expect it will be only T-Mobile.

I would rather have them offer to sell you more - - at the highest rates they pay plus a percentage. Else allow you to rollover some - this way you would have some saved up for vacations. Educating users about navigation systems with local or saved maps would also help reduce roaming overall.

Yes, capped and you can not buy more. 300MB for old ED1500 plans, 100MB for current (per month).

Sprint has already answered that with their rural partners, AT&T roaming and now T-Mobile roaming. Often limited to 3G speeds.

SGS Reference Table (Sequential GCI Sector) Band/Sector SGS SGS Band/Sector B25 -A 00 00 B25 -A B25 -B 09 01 B25#2-A B25 -Γ 12 02 B26 -A B25#2-A 01 03 B41#A-A B25#2-B 0A 04 B41#A-B B25#2-Γ 13 05 B41#A-Γ B26 -A 02 06 B41#C-A B26 -B 0B 07 B41#C-B B26 -Γ 14 08 B41#C-Γ B41#A-A 03 09 B25 -B B41#A-B 04 0A B25#2-B B41#A-Γ 05 0B B26 -B B41#B-A 0C 0C B41#B-A B41#B-B 0D 0D B41#B-B B41#B-Γ 0E 0E B41#B-Γ B41#C-A 06 0F B41#D-A B41#C-B 07 10 B41#D-B B41#C-Γ 08 11 B41#D-Γ B41#D-A 0F 12 B25 -Γ B41#D-B 10 13 B25#2-Γ B41#D-Γ 11 14 B26 -Γ B41#E-A 15 15 B41#E-A B41#E-B 16 16 B41#E-B B41#E-Γ 17 17 B41#E-Γ B41#F-A 18 18 B41#F-A B41#F-B 19 19 B41#F-B B41#F-Γ 1A 1A B41#F-Γ Keep this for use on phones without EARFCN reporting at SGS sites until SCP can handle them.

Sprint has been doing work for VoLTE/5G that has affected Magic Boxes for a night or two:

I think the real answer is to improve those markets with more sites, but this can not be done in isolation. To do that they need more cash from the successful markets. I would not be surprised to see a premium for 5g service for that reason. Pricing is whatever the market will bear. Currently Sprint likely incurs more expensive roaming in these weak areas. Furthermore they likely analyze sites on current profitability. I think their current way of handling pricing in weak service areas is to give credits to whiners. The question then becomes is the issue weak signal or overloaded sites? I tend to think many of Sprint issues are related to limited backhaul because it has such a big impact on their operating costs. If any area has fewer customers, then it will tend to have greater variation in network performance just based on queue theory. The good news is if these sites do not have triband, then they will likely get more backhaul when that occurs and then they can increase the band 25 coverage because of band 41. Note that not all areas have band 41 (or band 26 LTE). Sprint may also be seeing if the merger goes through in these areas. No sense in improving a weak area if T-Mobile already has great coverage. My general advice is not to worship any carrier. While reading more scientifically based market reports such as Root Metrics is good, it still is best to actually measure carriers in the areas you need it with the type of phone you will likely use. Ideally you have the best signal phone the carrier offers for these tests. Currently that would be the Samsung Galaxy S9/S9+/Note 9 for Sprint and T-Mobile. Likely for AT&T as well. Uncertain for Verizon. Apple users tend to have to suffer worse signal performance (including lack of latest bands/carrier aggregation) to get the other features they love.

I would not let these Magic Boxes collect dust, but rather put them to use somewhere that has RF shadows - work, charity, store, etc. I have my Magic Box positioned to supply signal where I need it at a client. Also serves a daycare and a shopping center across the street.

Try this one: https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/dish-frontier-cwa-others-lead-opposition-to-sprint-t-mobile-merger related: https://seekingalpha.com/news/3386206-dish-altice-usa-weigh-sprint-t-mobile-merger https://www.multichannel.com/news/dish-files-petition-to-deny-t-mobile-sprint-merger https://www.multichannel.com/news/altice-usa-files-in-opposition-to-t-mobile-sprint-merger

Some required core updates, prerequisite upgrades, Samsung sites may have required special modules and then changing the GCI sectors (Sprint tends not to go ahead until all three of its vendors can do something. Latest example - Massive MIMO). Another huge factor was likely the cost of backhaul. They also had to get Son's approval and raise the capital. 5G represents a leapfrog opportunity for Sprint. Most people don't understand how close to bankruptcy Sprint was before Marcelo took over.

I would like to see the cost versus 8T8R.

I should have explicitly said cheaper. 4G will be around for a while with the average phone life at 3 years, meaning some keep their phone for 4 or 5 years or even longer.

Quite a number of us have been looking at this issue for months, which I call Sequential GCI Sectors (SGS). For those unfamiliar it eliminates the special 8T8R market GCI and reorders all GCI band sectors first by sector then by band. Without software help this is uncomprehensible to most people. It took a while to get a reasonable sample of data from all sectors from various sites in various tracked markets. Sprint was also making changes and initially had various models in different markets. This has only been seen in Samsung markets, although I have looked at data from ALU and Ericsson markets. It should be noted that Mini Macros and B41 small cells are not affected. It now seems to have stabilized for a while around what is shown in ingenium's chart: Implementation is growing and is getting faster. Through the many logs I analyze I have seen it pop up in more and more markets. Still uncertain as to the reason. The latest theory is for 4x4 MIMO and 256 QAM with a long line of failed theories behind that one. There are areas of uncertainty surrounding 1) counties with portions of various b41 radius on different frequencies and 2) the handling of 4th and 5th carriers. We are hoping that Sequential GCI Sectors (SGS) in Columbus and Cincinnati will soon spread to such areas so we have a better data sample. Currently we only have the area around Youngstown to work with in this regard. Joski1624 has been key in this along with ingenium. I have handled this with a cutover date for GCIs and tracking expired b41 GCIs. Early on implementation stretched out over a couple of weeks, but it now seems entire sites are done at once. I process logs first to find any Sequential GCI Sectors (SGS) sites which are ranked into Yes, Maybe, and No. "Yes" is determined unique GCI endings which can be increased if you have detailed spreadsheet data on the site that is reasonably current. These become Approved SGS sites with the earliest one becoming the cutover date which is stored for future use. "Maybe" are unique GCI endings that don't have an expected EARFCN. Many of these are transition errors but a signification number are for sites where more data is needed. These become possible SGS sites and are flagged for followup. The approved SGS site data is then processed for new carriers and missing/changed PCIs. B41 is converted back to its old GCI including GCI sectors for this purpose plus to provide data for the expired B41 sites. The expired b41 sites is also used for Mini Macro GCIs that have been replaced with 8T8R in case they appear elsewhere in the future. This effort allows old spreadsheets to be retained. Should a market fully convert (none found so far) to Sequential GCI Sectors (SGS) it will be worth revisiting this multi-step process to simplify it. The unresolved issue of sites in counties with portions of various b41 radius on different frequencies is the most difficult for SCP. Sheets may have to track earfcns for those areas and/or store the SGS sectors for them to be properly rebuilt for SCP "national" logs. Markets with sheets will want to let SCP know the approved SGS sites as users may not be on the right band or sector to know independently. This way regular sites could be stored in their compressed format while only the SGS sites would need more entries. SCP may need to track SGS sites for markets without sheets based on past key GCI sectors. This may also be the right time for SCP to allow the direct importation of true site lat/longs as RSRP allows for easier detection of EARFCNs in transition. Another issue that would help is a more resilient error handling (retries) for rooted modem earfcns. Currently this is often tripped by other apps such as LTE Discovery (used for its airplane mode like ability) or Network Signal Guru (for bandwidth, MIMO and QAM detection). Presently you must exit and restart SCP to regain EARFCN detection in such cases. Based on past history, it is safe to assume that Sprint will not totally upgrade all sites in a market to Sequential GCI Sectors (SGS), but it will likely dominate -- it will just take a while in true Sprint fashion. Many of us S4Gru folks have retained older phones (I have 4) for assigning to different signal tracking purposes. The general public often has older phones just like these as their main phone. Without Sequential GCI Sectors (SGS) support older phones in SGS areas may soon become worthless for interactive signal detection and learning.

It is disappointing that Sprint does not have a not Massive MIMO 5G option. I assume the price would be significantly less for less robust solution that would allow for both 4G and 5NR. This would allow more places to have 5NR sooner.

I have been having an issue with Sensorly mapping on Android Oreo which is new to my V20. Trips map fine (when it does not crash), but results do not appear on map for new area of Sprint coverage. Next time I will try on an older phone.

Various reports have stated since February That the LG G5 is to get the Android O "Oreo" update. On July 4th versions were released for Korea. Then the Sprint LG V20 got the update. A few hours ago T-Mobile said this: https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-37249 My guess is Sprint is not far behind.

5G is the truly unique item for Sprint. Do they have enough cash to make it fully work in a few markets? Ideally you would want all sites with Massive MIMO, which would be best done in a market where Sprint has all the B41 spectrum. If they do just a handful of sites in each market, people will quickly see through that and only the innovators will buy 5G phones.

The nail that sticks up gets hammered down. Within 6 months both Verizon and AT&T will have answered this*. Sprint improves in so few places that it does not cost the duo much to answer each one before the public catches on and Sprint can reap significant rewards. Such a reply is much more difficult with T-Mobile since they have significant cash flow. * I have seen this happen many times over the years. Still improvements like this should be celebrated by us Sprint users!!

So far we have found a grand total of one Massive MIMO iirc.

Sprint often poorly covers nearby rural towns or rest areas (Shentel does a much better job with this). These rural areas are likely where much of the site reductions will be made because you can not afford too many sites given lower subscriber density. This will also work the other way in terms of expansion. Twice as many users will make a site viable. The urban areas will have site reductions just given the bulk of the sites are located there. Co-sites will likely be consolidated on one rack if possible and re-aimed. Same with the other retained sites. Small cells for coverage will need to be moved, possibly true for those providing better indoor coverage.

If Sprint had more cash, I am sure they would be deploying 5G ready B41 equipment instead of 8T8Rs.

Yes please. I and most other users in Ohio have turned off logging and/location at one time or another just by handling our phones. Quite frustrating/humiliating for those with only one phone. Embarrassing for those with more.