lordsutch

Personally, I have no issue with most of how the "duopoly" grew their networks to get nationwide coverage: buying out or merging with regional or local carriers (many of whom were incompetent and/or couldn't afford the capex to move beyond TDMA or even AMPS) that have and continue to have geographic buildout requirements on cellular. Having national cellular and PCS networks are good for consumers through "long tail" effects; while most customers are in core coverage most of the time, most customers occasionally need some remote coverage (and usually different remote coverage than others). The more carriers that can cater to more of the long tail, the better. The two real problems I see: The cases where any carrier was allowed to obtain both Cellular A and Cellular B in a single market. In North America at least, the propagation characteristics of lower-band spectrum outweigh noninterference issues in making 850 valuable for ensuring basic coverage, including 911 access. The more recent mergers or attempted mergers that have been designed more to eliminate low-end competitors and increase incumbent market power (AT&T/Leap, T-Mobile/MetroPCS, AT&T/T-Mobile) than to broaden native footprints. That said, forcing AT&T to properly invest in South Texas rather than just cherry-picking the border cities and Corpus is a positive benefit of this settlement, particularly since Cricket was not going to do it once it took over Pocket.

One possibility: If you've enabled data compression in Chrome, you'll see it on any network. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

FWIW this weekend in the Carolinas and Georgia I saw a lot of EDGE in places where Sprint has LTE or at least native EVDO, and very few places where there was even T-Mobile FauxG with weaker Sprint coverage (1x/EVDO/roaming) - really only around Florence SC where Sprint's buildout has been slow. The good news for Magenta is that if Sprint can get backhaul to these sites, they should be able to do so too, but the bad news is that I can't imagine it'll be much faster for T-Mobile to roll out than it was for Sprint; they'll still be dealing with the likes of Windstream, CenturyTel, and mom-and-pop/coop telcos. Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

This one has just the new markets: http://newsroom.sprint.com/news-releases/sprint-continues-4g-lte-expansion-with-20-new-markets.htm Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

Let's bear in mind that before the mid-90s, broadcast TV operated only under the must-carry rules and didn't receive anything in return for cable carriage. After all, from the broacasters' perspective, cable ensured that many people in their market area could get good to excellent reception who wouldn't have it otherwise due to signal propagation issues (lack of line-of-sight, transmission distance, cochannel or adjacent channel interference, etc.). Plus the broadcasters (particularly the O and Os in major markets) have used retransmission consent as leverage to ensure carriage of their affiliated cable networks, whether viewers want them or not. And they've used it to play off the cable and satellite providers against each other to increase fees well beyond inflation, largely to spend absurd sums for the rights to carry pro and collegiate sports leagues, and increasingly and most egregiously even to ensure that broadband providers are sending them cash on the odd chance you might want to watch their shows online. Unless broadcasters are suggesting with a straight face that anyone who puts up an antenna to receive their broadcasts (which, after all, they are free to stop doing and go cable-only, and relinquish back their spectrum for use by others) should be sending them a monthly check, I find it very unpersuasive to argue that whether the antenna I use to receive their programming is on my property or my landlord's roof or in Aereo's server farm makes any difference as to whether or not I should have to pay them for their programming, directly or indirectly.

You may need to change the network mode under carrier settings as well; it may not reset itself when you reboot. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk