SturgeonGeneral

Looks like OA3 is still pushing, just got it this morning.

4.4.4 hasn't released yet, much less 5 Sent from my SPH-L720T using Tapatalk

Going the extra mile for clarity to end the confusion instead of prolonging the agony. It's obviously not being done as well as it could to this point. Sent from my SPH-L720T using Tapatalk

This: (Which may be a mistaken observation as I cannot reproduce it today despite a long testing session playing with every possible order of action I could think of) The biggest problem in the back and forth is a lack of desire to be patient and try to understand the context of what everyone is talking about and what their knowledge levels are. People are getting frustrated and aren't taking measures to mitigate that. "LTE-only", taken at face value doesn't suggest "LTE-only (plus some other switches thrown in that aren't specifically listed, but that may be important to what you're trying to accomplish.)" In turn, "texts can be sent purely via LTE" doesn't match up to the experience of those of us that use LTE-only as a tool to help find new towers and filter out interference from 3G towers. Keep in mind that while some of you may be hardcore on the subject or employed in the field, a lot of those trying to help search, simply want more information on where to expect the best service when they are out and about. We play with some tools that help with that, but are also trying to learn bits and pieces as we go. We get things wrong because there is a lot of bad information out there and you don't always know who is right or wrong. When things don't add up, you use common sense to try to fill in the gaps. If the high-end self-proclaimed tech masters can't figure out how to understand the misunderstanding and clarify it in such a way that in can be explained to noobs, how do you expect a noob to be able to articulate what is going on? The educated have a much better grasp of the overall picture and they should bear the heavy lifting if they're going to take exception with the things that are said. This post suggested to me that this guy is using LTE-only mode, and like me, didn't know that it was more than that. Which is nice and all, except for: Which is what I saw today when I ran my tests. The problem is that, in my limited experience and studies, I have read this article, http://s4gru.com/index.php?/blog/1/entry-357-nexus-5-and-lg-g2-experience-temporary-sprint-lte-connectivity-issues-due-to-circuit-switched-fallback-technology/ Which talks about: "Here is how it works in the simplest way I can describe. When your Triband LTE device has an LTE signal, it cannot receive or make calls on its own. It is just using LTE data happily. However, what if someone calls you? How does it get through the CDMA network to your device? Via CSFB. When the Sprint network tries to forward a call to your device but cannot see it via CDMA, it then checks for an LTE connection to your device. If it sees one, it tells your device to disconnect from LTE for a moment and reconnect to CDMA. Your device then jumps over to take the call on Sprint CDMA and the LTE session is interrupted. This happens very fast and seamlessly. Except for the loss of data availability. If you receive a text, the Sprint network is able to route it to your device via LTE." Use some imagination and you can see how someone might be confused into thinking that this is what they are seeing for texts in LTE-only as well. It looks like it is trying to do an eCSFB fallback. Once they see the parallels, then it's a short jump of logic to mistakenly equate the two. If someone is trying to learn, help them learn, don't just stomp on them. Sending them back through the thread isn't always a good idea either. Going back and reading the thread is painful, and you don't always know who is right or wrong. Re-emphasize what is correct and explain why something they claim is wrong. Ideally with external and reliable references and little tests that can help prove a point. At one point someone said that it was so because it was in the SPEC. In that same spec VOLTE (voip) is possible too. I laughed. Is VOLTE implemented yet? See how it looks to an outsider? The one that pointed at the spec looked the fool. He was right, but he was wrong at the same time. The spec alone is no guarantee since there is more to it than that. http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/5001-breaking-band-tri-band-lte-ecsfb-issues-thread/page-42&do=findComment&comment=372779 ================= Having said all that, this is my current takeaway: If you're using LTE-Only mode on a GS4T (Galaxy S4 Triband / (Spark), do not expect to have a texting conversation with anyone. One way or another, something necessary (don't care what / doesn't matter what?) to that process is disabled -even though the process can take place over LTE, something else is keeping it from happening. A text is apparently not just a pure "data" transaction like browsing the internet, or using any other number of internet applications capable of a similar thing.

That doesn't follow experience. After the initial "proving" test, I took out out of LTE only, reset the phone to get it back to full functionality, then decided to experiment more midway through the boot process. Look at my subsequent post. By the time I walked around the house to my second tower, it worked. Flawlessly. It worked on that new tower, another one, and then even on the original. So, is it randomly throwing these other "background switches" also? I'd prefer to have a more hard and fast rule -and reliable explanation. I'm just going to have to do some more experimentation.

After reading more, I decided to continue my tests and wandered around the house to connect to all the towers around me. Depending on where I am in the house, I can normally mask signals and connect to three 4G towers reliably, and intermittently to three more. The second tower looped back the test text flawlessly and instantly, and by the time I returned to the first, it was working perfectly also. Can anyone explain that? Is there some theoretical "wake-up" or boot-up of idle software? OM03XC020 B26 OM23XC452 B41 OM70XC487 B25 I'm at a loss to explain the first result, but it does demonstrate that it DOES happen, even on an apparently capable tower. The only major change was the necessary reboot of the phone to take it back into LTE+CDMA+EVDO mode. I do not reboot when going into LTE only modes. They've never proven necessary. After reboot, I allowed the phone to reconnect to vowifi, I took the phone into LTE only again and tested text loopback on VOWIFI again as I wandered to my 2nd tower access location in the house. Once there, I disabled wifi, and that tower (B25) worked. I walked to the third tower (B41), and that worked, and I returned to my starting point in the basment and the first tower was now working fine for a text loopback on LTE only. FM (and I don't mean Frequency Modulation)

I just dropped my GS4T into LTE only mode and ran a little test. The first text was sent while connected to my home network. The second two were with wifi disabled and only connected to a B26 connection. Once I took it back out of LTE only mode to LTE+CDMA+EVDO mode and restarted, the backlogged texts came through. He's right. I've run into this whenever I have been out in the boonies in LTE only mode looking for new 4G towers. It may be peculiar to certain phones, but I know for a (demonstrated) fact that mine is one of them. While it may be listed in the standard, like volte, it isn't necessarily implemented -yet.

Amazing.

I mean PMG's - the one in question, not yours. Besides his model number seems to bear out that it isn't a "T". http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Galaxy-S4-Black-Sprint/dp/B00CEKXJ3Y/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418274889&sr=8-1&keywords=galaxy+s4+sprint Nothing in the official specs references SPARK or 720T or TriMode or Trband, or any of the other flags that denote a spark phone.

Amazon isn't just Amazon. It's more like an ebay free-for-all storefront. You don't always know who your supplier is.

If it's cheap, assume it's the legacy models they are trying to get rid of. The "s" isn't single band, tri band was an afterthought. If it isn't SPH-L720T all jammed together then it definitely isn't tri band. Simple as that. Anything after that point is cosmetic and irrelevant to the radios. Sent from my SPH-L720T using Tapatalk

Interesting, maybe there's some sort of processing center that had an outage.

Like I said, mine's back up and connecting fine again. Just a weird long stretch of no service.

I had an interruption in voice over wifi for almost a week, I was beginning to wonder if it was going to come back. It did just tonight. I also had a local tower happen to upgrade from 3g to 4g this week. Makes me wonder if that may have had some effect on the login or handover process. You would think that it would purely be an internet based process not requiring a tower at all, but it made me wonder at the coincidence.

1. If your phone is not stock, that MAY be part of your problem in the first place. 2. Do you understand the difference between the TRI-Band spark and standard single band phones? If your modified phone allows you to do so, disable band 41, play with it and see if that improves matters. Then disable band 26 and play some more. Then re-enable band 41 and play some more. Those two frequencies are the "Spark" components that differentiate from the single band phones. I would think that if you're blaming spark, you're blaming one or both of those frequency bands. How to enable/disable specific bands - this is for a stock phone: You will probably need your MSL code. See this article to get the reader and obtain your code: http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/5273-samsung-galaxy-s4t-l720t-tri-band-user-discussion-thread/page-14&do=findComment&comment=323656 From the phone dialer enter: ##data# (##3282#) and that will enter your phone into the data programming mode. Select EDIT enter your MSL code when prompted scroll down and select LTE and you can enable/disable each band here I would reboot the phone between changes to get a clean boot/connection to the network and play with it for an extended period of time 30-60 min to allow a proper test. I have a difficult time believing this is the problem as this is the exact opposite experience that spark is supposed to have. The network is supposed to monitor the connection and be smart enough to tell the phone to shift as necessary for the highest performance available with the resources present. Fully enabled, the phone itself has little to do with the actual decision process. I would be VERY interested in the results of your experiments. Let me know if you have any questions regarding the instructions above.

I did a quick bit of looking this morning and only found a single update listed and it was applicable to both phones and had the same suffix, I didn't think to compare the full id's. The rollout started on or around the July date you indicated and there was another indication that it was due to start on the s4t not too long ago -a couple weeks back, maybe. Most say the rollouts go by serial inside of a specific carrier. Unless it is going in reverse order, or there is some other delay due to reports of problems in the wild, then I'd be skeptical about the reports. I haven't seen it yet on my early phone. The vo wifi came to me relatively early so it seems to bear out.

Is her phone a straight S4 and NOT a triband? I'd bet that it is. Since the newer tribands are higher serial numbers, the straight S4s should see it first. Once they are pushed, then the Triband phones should start getting the push. Since mine was purchased on release day, mine should be one of the first sparks to get it.

After the Photon fiasco, it'll be a long time before I go back to Motorola. Samsung hasn't been even a tiny percentage of the problem that dealing with Moto was. As far as I'm concerned, they still owe me a phone. I paid good money for a "flagship" Photon and got a pile of completely unsupported junk. For me, it'll be nice to see what Samsung manages down the road.

The exact quote was: "HD Voice allows for clearer sounding speech, but it only works on calls where both users have supported devices. Over two dozen high-end devices make this list, but that still leaves off quite a bit of folk." How did you get any accounting of what DOESN'T support it? Nowhere in that quote is "dozens of Sprint devices that don't support". That is exactly the opposite of the statement. Did you misread it? Now, unless I'm misreading something horribly also, the discussion / complaint is about possible reasons why it wouldn't work consistently. There are a lot of details missing regarding the reports' conditions under which it is expected to, but doesn't work. I'm merely providing shotgunned ideas of potential and logical glitches that could explain matters. So, via a quote from above: RE: "Not sure why it isn't all the time." Caveat: Until I have the update in hand myself for this phone, I won't have any firsthand experience with it so I'm relying on published reports and common sense to offer ideas. My reply would be: Judging by what this is (high bandwidth audio), it seems to me that you may be expecting consistent perfection from a system that isn't capable of delivering it (yet?). Between likely unknown recipient device software and even external hardware configurations, (do some bluetooth devices affect matters?) varying (network / tower) (bandwidth / signal) demands, device limitations, and who knows what else, I can't say that I'm surprised at all that the reliability is at the level being reported here. Consider that not everyone is sitting on a clean WAN/LAN/vowifi or strong voice signal all the time, especially when one or the other is moving. I think it might require a fast and stable connection from end to end for both parties to get the performance you expect. I suppose that while even better compressed, this is still at the higher ends of the capabilities of that side of the network. While below 30% may be bit disappointing, I'm absolutely not surprised that it isn't "all the time". Have you done controlled testing? You imply (see above) that you are just working off of only the internal phone logs after the fact -which seems hardly a reliable metric. Even so, isn't this just a temporary stepping stone for the 720T while we wait for the promised eventual VOLTE implementation? Since it seems to be transitional and isn't the expected end configuration for the 720T, I'm not going to get too excited or disappointed over it.

There may also be a bandwidth requirement on both ends as well. If both parties don't simultaneously have the data bandwidth available on the network then that would force a downgrade in performance as well.

It likely takes more than just hardware to make it go. Think in these terms: We're getting Voice over WiFi now, yet it takes Sprint network and more software upgrades to implement it over LTE.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/07/30/sprint-galaxy-s4-receive-ota-software-update-l720vpufng2-bringing-minor-enhancements/ Per the article: "HD Voice allows for clearer sounding speech, but it only works on calls where both users have supported devices. Over two dozen high-end devices make this list, but that still leaves off quite a bit of folk."

Hmm. Mine still works. I didn't download a fresh copy though so it's possible the app has been changed.

I get the premium version with my pc subscription. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.trendmicro.tmmspersonal

Installed but I don't think it does much more than spy. I also have trend micro mobile security which seems to be a lot more useful and effective.