lordsutch

I hate to keep going around and around in circles on this, but from Sprint's perspective (or from Verizon's perspective, for that matter) there's no reason to deploy W-CDMA/UMTS as a stopgap before going all-LTE in 5-8 years, once the power efficiency and signal propagation issues with VoLTE are worked out (or are offset by the greater costs of keeping CDMA equipment running). If Sprint wasn't planning to keep CDMA around for 5+ years, they would have just bolted LTE onto their existing towers and not bothered with NV.

Yes, 1X won't be around forever, but if anything 1X will probably be around longer than EVDO. It does what it does well, and WCDMA just isn't worth the bandwidth. And I don't see what bringing on T-Metro and its downscale clientele does for making Sprint a more competitive #3 carrier; sure you'd be rolling in spectrum but it's not at all obvious Sprint really needs it outside a few markets, where buying up local carriers or executing spectrum buys/swaps/sharing arrangements would probably be cheaper.

Ha, they apparently miss my monthly bill now that I've moved out of nTelos-land.

Somehow I can't see Softbank+Sprint renewing their wholesale deal unless nTelos gets the lead out and becomes far more aggressive in rolling out Sprint-compatible LTE. Shentel has really put nTelos to shame working just up the road.

I was going to say that Bell and Telus switched to W-CDMA because they wanted to offer the iPhone 3GS. Plus there is the element of "Keeping up with the Jones'".

The other factor is that Canada has a population of 35 million people; even as the legacy carrier in most of their markets, Bell+Telus have something like 15 million customers between them. By contrast, the US's 4th largest carrier, T-Metro has 43 million customers. I think they recognized they simply didn't have the scale to attract custom handsets from leading manufacturers anymore if they stuck to CDMA2000. And, since they had the bandwidth to burn, they were able to transition to 3GPP, unlike the US regional carriers who find themselves in the same position like C Spire, Alltel (before VZW buyout), US Cellular, nTelos, and Cincy Bell (who are stuck often getting lower-end knockoffs of Sprint and Verizon stuff, months later).

So long as Verizon is still on CDMA for voice, Sprint should have no problem obtaining CDMA handsets at reasonable prices. And Verizon's VoLTE-in-2014 BS notwithstanding, they're not going to be positioned to drop CDMA from mainstream handsets for years. Sure, in 7 years everyone will be 3GPP-only, but there's a lot of LTE bugs to be worked out between now and then.

(I can see Verizon selling VoLTE-only phones in 2014 as a cheap prepaid option to compete with Virgin/T-Metro/Cricket, but they're not going to sell a VoLTE-only Galaxy S5 on postpaid. Similarly I could see Sprint selling some VoLTE-only prepaid handsets down the road.)

DashClock (lock screen widget & launcher widget) is nice (and free) for Android 4.2.x. Very minimalist and Halo-friendly.

It's disappointing that Sprint is losing some of its SRA partners; however, over the medium/long term I expect Sprint to come out ahead by adding native coverage in the region consistent with its historical native buildout in rural areas (covering the key cities and Interstate/major highway corridors).

If only sprint used sim cards. Then you can activate on sprint as you go for the same $70 a month.

Interestingly enough, when I logged onto my Sprint account yesterday one of the options in the sidebar was "Activate new SIM." (It just took me to the "Activate new phone" screen however.) So apparently SIM activation is coming.

SouthernLINC Wireless introduces new Motorola device, high-speed data plans

A dual-SIM device running Android 2.3, at the low-low price of $199 (after $100 MIR). Capped-data nationwide plans starting at $85. All hail the great and powerful SouthernLINC.

My understanding is that in the border zones (at least where the agreements are finalized) Sprint can use all of its ESMR spectrum, but there are strict bleed-over limits on US-side use of the spectrum that's allocated to Mexico and Canada, so it will take some extra RF engineering to utilize all of ESMR; it wouldn't surprise me if Sprint had to put separate directional antennas up for ESMR, for example, in these areas. They may be able to squeeze in 1X easier since the bleed-over limits on US-priority parts of the ESMR spectrum are easier to meet.

Someone needs to tell these guys to go and drive somewhere that's purple in Sensorly to test LTE. Particularly someone in the SF market, where there's plenty of LTE about to be found...

Sensorly can be slow to update at times; you may also need to zoom in and out of the area for the map tile cache to update.

Also, it's possible your info didn't upload right away; if you have a large number of "messages to send" on the Details screen, Sensorly's data collection may have been down.

Utah is a later-round market. Certainly it will get NV, along with every other "native" Sprint market (the affiliates are a bit more up in the air), but "when" is not clear yet. There's no official word but pretty much every market should be well underway by end of 2013 and most will be underway sooner, including Utah.

On Utah specifically, another member has dug up some info on building permits in Salt Lake County that's available to sponsors at http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/3353-utah-nv-build-permit-map/ So while I can't really say what the member has found in exact terms, I will say that it is clear that Sprint's contractors are already active in the market doing some site work; that doesn't however mean that backhaul's in place or that new antennas are installed yet (it could be cabinets or electrical feed or any one of the other parts of the site upgrade that has to come together).

I was hoping someone would come along. This thread has been dead for awhile. I was wondering if all the Sprint folks fled Memphis.

I have family there... in fact when I was last in town last month my mom's house was just on the fringe of LTE coverage (sometimes I could get it in the driveway, but usually it cut out just as I turned onto her street). I'm also responsible for the Sensorly smudges northeast of Olive Branch/southwest of Collierville, due to the tower out near Forest Hill-Irene & Shelby Drive, I think.

That Shores tower is where my phone parks when I'm in Ocala visiting family, so it'll be nice. At least he has Comcast broadband now; being at the fringe of EVDO on my Virgin Mobile 3G stick was no fun when I used to visit back in the day.

I was in the shores in today they only have one Sprint tower and that's behind the winn dixie. Doesn't look like they started anything yet from what I observed yet

FYI, there's another tower further southeast on Maricamp by Lake Weir High School that covers the older part of the Shores. As for when they'll be upgraded, your guess is as good as mine; backhaul may be more of an issue in the Shores since the cable plant is Comcast rather than Cox, and Embarq has never put much effort into good DSL coverage out that way.

Best Buy at least doesn't add their own ETF. Their current promotion gives you 10% off and 1000 bonus RZ points (= $20 in RZ bucks). And if you signed up back in February (you might have done and forgot) they had a promotion where if you signed up you'd get a $50 gift card for upgrades between February and December 31, which should stack on the current promotion.

SID alone should be a giveaway; the PRL entries for those SIDs simply won't scan anything other than ESMR spectrum for 1X (they will scan PCS for EVDO, though, of course); from digiblur's PRL decodes:

SID: 22412 Sprint Nextel - Bloomington IN; Indianapolis IN; Marion IN Prio:Same Roam:None
1X: S/476 S/526
EV: Sprint(0084:0AC0) P/50 P/650 P/550 P/325 P/475 P/600 P/125

SID: 4135 Sprint - Indianapolis IN Prio:Same Roam:None
1X: P/50 P/25 P/200 P/100 P/75 P/350 P/925 P/325 P/375
EV: Sprint(0084:0AC0) P/50 P/650 P/550 P/325 P/475 P/600 P/125

SID: 4148 Sprint - Louisville Lexington Evansville KY Prio:More Roam:None
1X: P/500 P/625 P/575 P/675 P/425
EV: Sprint(0084:0AC0) P/50 P/650 P/550 P/325 P/475 P/600 P/125

The HTC One is on the bottom, and from the look of the S4 pictures its on the bottom as well.

Hence my point. In dock mode I want my phone to be horizontal (landscape); if you put the charging port on the bottom (in portrait/vertical orientation), that produces a goofy, asymmetric mount design. The Evo LTE mount, on the other hand, is perfect. Hence for me bottom charging is a step back to the OG Evo's design, and not a positive development.

Having the microUSB port on the side is nice for car and desktop docks, though.

Not that weird; the Sprint Georgia market is a 3rd/4th round market, while Atlanta was 1st round. It's actually a bit surprising they've gone ahead with the 3G Ground Mount sites rather than waiting to do everything at once (without going too deeply into sponsor info, only a few of the sites that are "live" so far in the Georgia market are not GMOs).

My guess is now that most of the 2nd round markets are picking up steam and Atlanta-Athens is on the downswing the Georgia market will start getting more 4G love in the next month or two.

I think the FCC would probably approve of a merger or mergers that improved Sprint's geographic coverage & strengthened its rural presence, which would be the exact opposite of a T-Mobile+MetroPCS (or Cricket or other metro carrier) merger. Merging with T-Metro would probably require lots of divestitures, and would be yet another merger of incompatible technologies.

Frankly I think a roll-up of regional CDMA carriers (C Spire, nTelos, US Cellular, whatever's left of divested Alltel, etc.) in states where Sprint has limited/no native coverage is much more likely than a T-Metro merger.

I doubt WiMax will come down sooner; it may accelerate dual deployment, but frankly I think the "assurances" are simply hot air. Sprint wasn't going to deploy new Huawei gear, and (AFAIK) Huawei doesn't make the gear they need to add LTE to the Clearwire network anyway.

As for the "national security implications" of Huawei stuff, my take is that if the equipment relies on chips made in mainland China (and the whole network relies on Chinese-made chips, both at the user equipment and the network equipment level), it's just as easy to install backdoors on the silicon if it has a "Samsung" or "Alcatel-Lucent" or "Ericcson" label on the outside of the box as it is if it has "Huawei" on the box. So really this is all protectionist, nativist noise.

I tried a few different 4.2+ ROMs on my EVO, none populated any of the LTE info through the API. They were all custom, since Sprint hasn't officially released anything 4.2 yet, but I didn't think that would matter..

Interesting. I got bored enough to root my device and flash CyanogenMod 10.1 (nightly 20130312, the latest I could find at get.cm, based on AOSP 4.2.2) and while I haven't had the chance to test it out in an LTE area yet, the CellInfoLte API seems to be returning something in my app at least:

03-23 16:42:42.425: D/HomeActivity(11499): CellInfoLte: mRegistered=YES mTimeStampType=unknown mTimeStamp=9223372036854775807ns, LteCellIdentitiy:android.telephony.CellIdentityLte@7fffff65 mMcc=2147483647 mMnc=2147483647 mCi=2147483647 mPci=2147483647 mTac=2147483647, CellSignalStrengthLte: ss=2147483647 rsrp=2147483647 rsrq=2147483647 rssnr=2147483647 cqi=2147483647 ta=2147483647

It's all invalid values, of course, since I'm not in an LTE area. But my reading of the code paths is that it wouldn't populate anything at all if the LTE API didn't work on the device.

I'm sure SoftBank sounds awesome in Japanese (remember, in Asia, they often use English for the sound value rather than the meaning of the underlying words). They could do what Deutsche Telekom did and use something like "SB Mobile." Or, somewhat out of left field, they could use some variation of Clear, like "Clear Mobile."

That said I think Sprint has a decent name; it goes well with their major sponsorships, like the NASCAR Sprint Cup. It just needs to be positioned a bit more upmarket, maybe with a branding refresh (swap out the font for something a bit more "serious" like Helvetica Condensed and come up with some new logo swoosh since nobody remembers the pin-drop). And with T-Mobile (+ metroPCS) edging downmarket, that may not be as hard to do as we might think.

Because of VZW's 750 tower spacing, I'd expect a lot of folks can't get Verizon LTE at decent speeds inside buildings either. There are always going to be places where Verizon will have better coverage than Sprint, and there are always going to be places where Sprint has better coverage than Verizon.

And, given that Sprint probably isn't putting ESMR LTE on every tower either (we haven't seen the FITs yet, but my guess is Sprint will be preferring range over density to improve its POPs coverage numbers and cut data roaming costs), the building penetration "win" probably will be less than people are anticipating, particularly given the fragility of LTE compared to 1X.