lordsutch

Ding. AT&T only had to maintain the Alltel CDMA network through June, so Sprint's probably now roaming on Verizon 1x in most of those areas. I haven't been down that way to verify though.

Engineering screens are the only way to be certain, since that data is not exported to public Android APIs, although most of the apps out there (SCP, LTE Discovery, my crapola app) have heuristics that can make pretty good guesses for existing networks based on patterns observed in the field. (I say this because nTelos' LTE rollout for Sprint customers may not fit the established patterns for cell IDs, particularly if it includes access to towers that nTelos has upgraded using the different equipment from that Sprint and Shentel use. So the apps may work, but they may not.)

I think the issue is that Sprint (and VZW) wouldn't be able to bring much reciprocal roaming to the table, which helps balance out the numbers so T-Mobile (and if they want AT&T) can offset the high charges in those countries against what they're getting from letting Rogers/Bell/Telus/Movistar/Telcel etc roam in the U.S. And Softbank doesn't have much to offer those companies to reciprocate except cheap Japan roaming in return - and that's not exactly a big draw for them. Technically it would be possible for North American iPhones of recent vintage and Nexus 5 and 6 and probably a few other devices (some of the 2015 flagship models have CDMA support under the hood but only act like it when a Sprint SIM is installed) to roam on Sprint 1x and EVDO with a Canadian or Mexican SIM card installed, but it would take a firmware change to activate all the CDMA bits and allow the user to manually switch on CDMA roaming since you wouldn't want it active all the time (I suppose you could cheat and program the firmware to switch on CDMA whenever it sees a 31x-xxx MCC-MNC signal around), and then you'd have to get it rolled out... Now maybe a Canadian or Mexican carrier with some juice that wants to get that baked into 2016 or 2017 phones could get it done, but that's well beyond what Sprint can request since it'd only affect phones being sold by those carriers. So I'm guessing it isn't going to happen. Maybe they would have some luck with iPad and hotspot roaming deals on LTE at least. Given how much the Canadian carriers screw over their customers on metered data pricing, they should be able to charge domestic Canadian data prices and pay Sprint wholesale rates to use its American LTE network and still come out way ahead.

There was a rumor a while back that Canada being added was imminent, with a specific start date even, but apparently it fell through at the proverbial last minute. That may be why you thought it was already included.