lordsutch

Looks like they're planning to close all of the locations in central Georgia, except the location in Houston County Galleria. A few are pretty close to the two existing Sprint preferred retailer stores; one is close to the location of the old corporate store in Warner Robins which they closed (leaving us with no corporate stores at all).

RE the Android Central hit piece, as I put it on Twitter, I think Marcelo Claure knows more about how to run Sprint than a writer on some random tech site.

Unlike AJ, I tend to think the argument that nobody "built" 100% coverage is rather specious. Yes, the ex-RBOC's wireless divisions, now called Verizon and AT&T as a result of mergers and acquisitions, built a sizeable chunk of the cellular coverage in America, but since almost all of those RBOCs were at some point part of AT&T - and only forced to become separate companies so AT&T could go on its wild goose chase to try to compete in the corporate computing business - there's no reason to believe old AT&T, with its resources from its wireline monopoly, couldn't have built a national AMPS footprint on 850 on the same timetable that the baby bells did from their regional near-monopolies. The first company to serve an area would find it relatively easy to recover its investment, particularly in the analog AMPS days when the solution to "moar range" was "get a bagphone" or "turn up the Tx power" rather than "we need a tower because TDMA or CDMA won't work beyond x kilometers due to speed of light issues throwing the timing out of sync." Now, whether a third or fourth competitor can economically build a near-100%-coverage network without the resources of a company that already has that rural coverage, given the opportunities for profitable expansion are diminished as a result, is a separate question. Hence it makes more sense for carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile to partner with regional or local carriers, even sometimes competitors, that already have wide coverage (e.g. RRPP) rather than building their own networks in those areas if capacity is sufficient. But if Sprint did buy out everyone in the RRPP, or T-Mobile did something similar, and operated a network as big as AT&T's, I don't think it would diminish or alter the achievement by saying "well, Sprint only really built out its first few dozen corporate markets, and the rest of their coverage was just bought."

Heh... I wouldn't mind replacing the Airave I snuck in my office in an undisclosed, fringe coverage location with one of these bad boys. Or at least a long-rumored Airave LTE...

Actually it only supports the BBC, which runs fewer than 25% of the free-to-air channels. The rest of the companies, including divisions of US media conglomerates, make do with advertising (and less of it than is allowed here). And other European countries do similar things without a TV license fee. The point is It Can Be Done if the political will is there to rationalize OTA TV, particularly since I doubt the next round of ATSC will be backward compatible with current OTA reception anyway.

Honestly (although I think we're edging WAY off topic) there are solutions for over-the-air TV; the UK and Ireland have both terrestrial and satellite free-to-air options (Freeview/Freesat) with better use of spectrum, including HDTV. It just requires the broadcasters to work together and multiplex signals rather than every affiliate trying to figure out what to do with its 6 MHz allocation on its own.