JWMaloney

Let's also not forget that Verizon's announcement only reiterated what they've already said in the past -- VoLTE is coming, just not right now. AT&T and T-Mobile are the only two currently launching.

I've found that to be on par with Ericsson's deployments until full optimization. Ericsson tends to aim band 26 LTE at the ground when they first launch it. It causes you to fall back to 3G because your device isn't expecting the band 26 signal to be worse than the band 25 signal, and since the downtilt is screwy, there are gaps.

TWRP, for two reasons: It lets you backup your partitions separately (including your EFS partition, which is great for swapping PRLs and such), and it doesn't hold your backups hostage. ClockworkMod made a change a while back in the name of security which puts your backups in a location on the phone that you can't easily pull them to your computer. ROM Manager has a feature that allows you to access your CWM backups over HTTP to archive them on your computer, but it's paid-only.

That was my thought process as well. They must think the consumer would find the distinction too confusing.

Interesting tidbit from that page: "For a customer to make or receive a VoLTE call, both parties must have VoLTE-enabled devices and be in an area where VoLTE is available."

The only part current Spark phones will not be able to take full advantage of is carrier aggregation. All devices will benefit from the new antennas and the overall increased capacity afforded by the additional carriers.

The difference is that I won't try to call you out for being a shill or fanboy for doing it, because your arguments are sound. The bottom line of my argument is that, regardless of anyone's moral opinion of Comcast, Netflix wants to use the same tactics to their advantage that everyone accuses Comcast of using. CDNs cost money, but Netflix wants a free ride. And Net Neutrality will not fix their problems. Both companies are trying to do what's best for their own bottom line.

No, because I don't have the agreement to reference. But if I had to guess, I would think an appropriate analogy would be wireless data abusers: Comcast and Cogent's peering agreement can only scale so far based on the physical hardware involved, and Comcast doesn't want to pay to upgrade the infrastructure to suit one big bandwidth hog when it would make more business sense to just interconnect directly with said hog. Last time you asked me that question, I was defending a technology, not a company. But you find yourself defending one of the most hated wireless carriers in the country on a daily basis. You do it because your arguments are technically correct, and I do the same. I don't care what the public opinion of a company is, I'm not going to let that obscure the facts.

I lumped that into Netflix trying to strong-arm freebies because of their dominant market position. There's no reason anyone should be obligated to give them free colo and bandwidth. From Netflix's Open Connect page: "Open Connect is a single-purpose Content Distribution Network, and by shifting to Open Connect, from using third-party commercial CDNs, we are able to save money" Everybody else pays millions building their CDNs; Netflix wants to do it for free.

I work for a software-as-a-service company. We host our own software in our own data center, and we pay two different providers for Internet connections. But we also have an offsite location for disaster recovery. We push a lot of backups offsite every day, and if we did it through the Internet, the offsite data center would charge us a hefty amount of money for the throughput we would require. We decided it was in our best interest financially to get a direct interconnection with that data center, so that's what we did. We now have a fat pipe to shove data through all day to our remote servers, and we cut out the middle man in the process. And that's what happened with Netflix and Comcast. Netflix was purchasing a connection from Cogent, and Cogent's connection with Comcast was completely saturated. Cogent wanted Comcast to upgrade that connection, and Comcast refused, because they shouldn't have to pay to upgrade that interconnect just because Cogent wants to shove more data through it. Interconnect agreements between Internet backbone providers are generally made based on the amount of traffic going in each direction. If the traffic is reciprocal (that is to say, the amount of traffic in both directions is approximately the same), they will generally make a free interconnect; but if the traffic tips more in one direction, the other provider will pay. The traffic flowing from Cogent to Comcast has steadily increased at a faster rate than the traffic in the other direction, and Cogent wants Comcast to pay to upgrade that interlink without revising the original agreement, even though it no longer applies since Cogent is shoving so much extra traffic through. So Netflix went to Comcast and asked for a direct interconnect, because they decided it was in their best interest to cut out the middle-man who was the cause of the bottleneck. Except instead of paying Comcast for that connection like they do Cogent, Netflix wanted it for free. Netflix, as the leading streaming video provider, tried to use their position to strong-arm a free interconnect out of Comcast, even though if they were going through one of Comcast's existing interconnect partners instead, they would have to pay, and the partner would have to pay Comcast. And Comcast rightly said no. I am all for Net Neutrality, but Netflix is not an ISP, and it would not at all apply to this situation. Comcast was right to deny free upgrades to Cogent and free interconnects to Netflix. Comcast is providing to Cogent exactly what their agreement states; Cogent wants to get more without paying. And Netflix wants to get something for nothing, which they think they can do since they're such a big player. Now they're trying to turn the public's misunderstanding of this in their favor.

I've turned it on and off plenty of times in the past as well. Nobody knows why it went wrong this time.

This video covers RSRQ by first covering RSRP and RSSI: http://lteuniversity.com/get_trained/video_tutorials/m/videotutorials/11555.aspx RSRQ = N * RSRP / RSSI, where: RSRP = Reference Signal Received Power (dBm) RSSI = Received Signal Strength Indicator (dBm) N = measured bandwidth This video also covers RSRP: http://lteuniversity.com/get_trained/video_tutorials/m/videotutorials/11523.aspx

A word of caution! I disabled Google Voice integration last night while doing some unrelated troubleshooting, and I was left with no voicemail at all -- not even stock Sprint voicemail. I had to call Sprint this morning and get voicemail re-provisioned onto my account. And now, even since I've done that, I cannot get Google Voice integration to complete successfully again: I talked to 5 different tech support agents for a combined total of over an hour with no luck. They have a list of criteria which can cause a line to become ineligible, and they said according to that list, I should be good to go. One of them even had the gall to give me Google's public phone number and tell me I needed to call Google! Something got seriously screwed up on my line when I removed Google Voice, which was evident by the fact that Sprint voicemail didn't automatically get added back. So keep that in mind before you go removing it if you have any intention of ever adding it back. I've done it plenty of times before successfully, so I don't know why this is suddenly a problem.

In addition to RSRP (dBm), there are RSRQ and RS-SINR. Just looking at RSRP won't tell you anything about interference or signal quality, but RS-SINR will. For all of those measurements, higher is better. Keep in mind that the wider the carrier deployed, the better edge-of-cell performance you will get. This is one of the reasons why Band 25 LTE is useless at -120 dBm but Band 41 works great well past that. T-Mobile uses wider carriers than Sprint, so they'll probably have better quality of signal at the same RSRP.

dBm is not the only measurement used to determine signal bars.

Their current holdings are narrowband and look like piano keys against the whole block. AJ has a nice graph of it somewhere. They will have to complete rebanding just like with 800 MHz.

In my area it was 10x10, giving them a total of 15x15, but I believe the LTE band is 10x10 due to potential interference with Sirius-XM. 900 MHz LTE is for machine-to-machine communication.

AT&T doesn't have extra PCS to divest in all of those locations. Where I live, for instance, AT&T doesn't own any AWS, so they just finished deploying LTE on their last available PCS spectrum for capacity.

You're thinking of McDonald's.

EARFCN allows you to approximate a maximum channel size in relation to band size. For instance, Band 26 (minus the cellular 850 range which Sprint doesn't own anywhere) downlink frequency ranges from 859-869 MHz. In many areas, Sprint uses an EARFCN of 8763, which has a center of 866.3 MHz. You can see that this is exactly 2.7 MHz away from the edge of the band, which means that, based on allowable LTE carrier sizes, this carrier can be a maximum of 5 MHz wide (with a guard of 200 KHz at the end of the band). You can review which range of spectrum is available in various markets and plot the detected EARFCNs against it to determine the largest possible carrier size.

Yeah! I mean, why would Apple knowingly release a phone that would cannibalize their iPod market? Or why would Wrigley release new brands of gum to compete against their old flavors? Sometimes it's better to compete with your own market share, because if you don't, someone else will.

Right, because his current net worth is definitely $0.

Some accounts are eligible for what is called "Framily merge" and will be able to join an existing Framily. You can call Sprint Care to see if the offer is available on your account. Generally, it will be available if all of your lines are out of contract.

You have to call and see if your account is eligible. Generally it is if you're out of contract. Come join mine!

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