hercules rockefeller

In my opinion most of the real value in network vision is the behind the scenes stuff; not the stuff that gets the attention like new towers, LTE, etc. It's laying the groundwork for future technologies that interests me. There are all sorts of crazy technologies in the works now that aren't available now, and Sprint should be well positioned to take advantage of them pretty soon.

I think the main drawback to turning on LTE without 3G and CSFB would be that you'll end up with areas in which older single band devices outperform newer Sprint Spark devices. That sends mixed messages marketing-wise, becuase Spark devices are supposed to be the latest and greatest devices. Maybe there's another, more technical reason for it as well, but I'm not aware of that.

I've been to a few games this season (including the AFC championship game, which seems like such a distant memory now!). I haven't tried the Wi-Fi lately, becuase it's always been restricted to Verizon subscribers (and IIRC dish network as well). But I did try it at the first game I went to this season, just in case something changed in the offseason, and it still took me to the login page where you've got to enter your verizon account number. It really pisses me off, too <gets on soapbox> becuase these sorts of exclusivity deals are exactly what's wrong with the entire telecome industry, IMO. Stadiums are mostly financed by the public and wireless carriers use wireless spectrum which in my opinion belongs to the citizens just as much as our land, air, and water (or any other national resource). I realize that the Broncos pay to lease the stadium from the local governments, and the wireless carriers pay for their spectrum when the FCC auctions it, but I don't think they've paid the true market value in either case. And that doesn't absolve either organization from a certain responsibility to the public interest, at least from an ethical perspective (on a legal level, I'm sure they've got their ducks in a row and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it). Or perhaps my issue is not with the Broncos and Verizon, who are corporations doing whatever they can to make a profit, but with the government's oversight of the public interest. There are very strong arguments that the public interest hasn't been fully served in regards to either spectrum and stadiums, but I don't want to get too far off topic here so I'll leave it at that.

I'd kill for LTE or even 1900 EVDO at Mile High next year... I'm pretty much always roaming in the south stands, and I have to toggle into airplane mode between exchaning texts with my freinds if I'm going to last through the whole game. And to make it worse, Verizon (my sworn enemy since back in the Nextel days) has a wifi network throughout the stadium which you can only access if you're a VZ customer. I'm guessing Sprint can't install anything onsite becuase Verizon's the Broncos' wireless sponsor and there's probably some sort of exclusivity deal incorporated into that.

In addition to the MVNOs, there are a lot of M2M / telemetry devices in the field that would need to be redeployed if / when Sprint moves away from CDMA. Those devices are a major PITA to replace, becuase they're installed in some other peice of equipment, so the customer has to send a technician out to wherever the device happens to be installed (which is often somewhere completely inconvenient, like an oil field out in the middle of Texas) to pull the modem and replace it. I think we'll at least see 1x advanced on 1900 and 800 for quite some time.

Personally I'll give the benefit of the doubt to those that claim to have made HD voice calls based on nothing more than the difference in audio quality (provided they're describing a call between two HD Voice capable sprint phones). It's one of those things that you'll definitely know it's HD when you hear it. And HD voice is definitely live in certain areas, Sprint just hasn't done much to publicize it, nor have they been very clear as to where it's live and where it isn't. That said, it'd still be nice to be able to post a screen shot just for the record.

I've personally had several customers in rural Texas complain of a lack of coverage after migrating from iDEN to CDMA, and when I looked up their location they had been 7-8 miles away from the nearest iDEN tower. They swore that they had flawless Nextel coverage even though our maps showed them as being in a marginal coverage area. I know it's apples and oranges to compare CDMA and iDEN even on the same frequencies, and in a lot of these areas in Texas feature ideal terrain for wide coverage; flat land, tall towers, low vegetation, etc. But when you figure that the new towers will be 800 mhz and use newer technology, I think there'll be coverage pretty far out there in the rural areas.