4ringsnbr

Not exactly... with the 12.2 AMR vocoder used, VoLTE is about 1.7x as efficient as 1xRTT. 1xAdvanced WITHOUT receive diversity in the handset is 3x as efficient as 1xRTT (according to Qualcomm) 1xAdvanced WITH receive diversity in the handset is 4x as efficient as 1xRTT (according to Qualcomm) Doing the math, this means that 1xA is 76% - 135% MORE efficient than VoLTE with current vocoders. However, this analysis assumes a 1.4 or 3 MHz LTE carrier, which aren't as efficient as 1x or EVDO. Only at a 5x5 or larger configuration can LTE meet or beat 1x / EVDO spectral efficiency at a UE category 3 design.

The administrative charge is a corporate processing fee not a tax... $1.50 per line for Sprint. Verizon charges $0.99 per line, but VZW's regulatory charge is only $0.16 per line. The regulatory charge is a fee related to handling FCC paperwork and governmental tax filings.

I think he meant that Metro was maxing out their spectrum in most of their markets.

That's actually a decent speed for that horrible signal-- you're at the edge of reception there.

That's where my office is-- and that speed is 11x faster than what you get during the workday (for the past 2 years). That's why I'm on big red now-- my speeds are around 40 mbps... 600x faster! You must've been on channel 100. Channel 75 & 175 are faster, but not by much. If they'd learn how to make the pilot redirect your channel assignment on EVDO like Verizon does, it would probably help tremendously. Just think of how poorly it would perform if I hadn't opened more than a dozen trouble tickets on that tower in the past two years... and they have done 2 EV carrier and 2 "data speed upgrades" on the tower since March 2011.

Exactly, the daily outage reports from Tampa-area Sprint users would lead most to believe that its network is the worst one. Truth is, all networks have their issues from time-to-time and place-to-place.

The LG Viper was approved by the FCC back on January 9. It should've been made available before the Galaxy Nexus, but all manufacturers have different factory schedules. Apple doesn't submit its new iPhones for approval generally until the day of release to prevent any pre-release info getting out. They run all the tests and hold for the FCC filing until launch day.

Just think how well Sprint's network will perform here as more and more users leave! If they don't do something fast, the areas where they have poor data performance are going to resolve themselves-- and not to Sprint's advantage. My Verizon friend told me that they're averaging almost 5000 ports PER DAY from Sprint (for the whole country). I don't know how accurate that is since he is a network performance engineer and not in the sales/transfers group, but it does make you think.

That's typical VZW eHRPD/EVDO performance I see too. LTE has improved lately-- was averaging 25/13 mpbs last month. Now averaging 33/15 mbps. No complaints here! Sprint here runs about 200 kbps if you're lucky. The pings on Sprint's 3G are close to the downloads (kbps) on VZW 3G here, and vice-versa.

When you sign up a new line of service or first move to a 4G device, Verizon gives you a SIM card. After that, when you buy a phone, you only get the phone-- you "activate" the new phone by taking your SIM out of your old phone and putting it into the new one. You'll only get a different SIM if yours is broken somehow or lost. People moving from older mini-SIMs (used in HTC phones & older droids) to newer micro-SIM phones (GNex, RAZR, RAZR MAXX, Droid 4) can request a new SIM if they don't want to clip their existing SIM to use.

You have to understand how the internet and IP networks work. When your phone is on the internet through WiFi, for example, it is assigned an IP address through your router-- that tells the network packets from the internet how to find you basically. When you switch over to 3G or 4G, your phone's IP address changes because the internet has to use a different route to find you (a different gateway and subnet). All LTE-A carrier aggregation does is combine numerous frequencies between your phone and the tower, but the internet's link to the tower controller must be the same route / path (subnet). If you try to aggregate a carrier channel from a different subnet or gateway, your phone would have to have two separate IP addresses to function since the address is a member of a subnet. If you aggregate Sprint's two frequencies, they all connect to the same internet gateway so there is no issue-- your phone has a single IP address and multiple air links to the tower for faster speeds. You CANNOT link to another gateway without changing IP addresses because your gateway (path to the actual internet) has changed... at that point, you can use one gateway OR the other, never BOTH. Since Clear's network is totally separate, the subnet, gateway, etc. are all different-- the link from the tower to the internet is different-- even if Clear shared the tower with Sprint, its base station is on a different subnet.

Don't fear eHRPD. When they have an authentication issue or LTE outage-- it's that gateway that is an issue. The phone looks for eHRPD as a fallback and within 30 seconds or so it will switch over to EVDO instead. Good old EVDO still works on the phone, and in the tower you have essentially two different networks (gateways): one set that is LTE / eHRPD with the other set EVDO/1x/CDMA. eHRPD is just EVDO air interface tied into the LTE gateway IP network. There is nothing to fear but fear itself!

I know alot of the suits at Sprint have promised this, but without major changes, there's no way the 2.5 GHz clearwire network will ever be included in any LTE-A carrier aggregation scheme. Sprint's ESMR LTE (if it is ever approved for use) and PCS LTE will use the same eNodeB gateways, IP subnets, and routing. Clearwire's LTE will use their gateways, a different IP subnet and network routing. Unless Sprint buys Clearwire and unifies their IP network with Sprint's, you'll never be able to use aggregated links on two SEPARATE IP networks-- how would the data ever get to your phone? You'd have to have a separate IP stack (with different IP addresses and subnet masks) and do aggregation of some kind in software in the phone, which would mean that separate IP sockets would have to be established in each network-- it wouldn't work. LTE-A aggregation would work with PCS and ESMR (if it ever happens).

I doubt I'll ever transfer back-- the price difference is negligible and VZW's coverage blows Sprint's away here (and especially in Mississippi...) Also, when I consider it took them 7.5 months to perform the first carrier upgrade here after approval and another 5 months to add backhaul for it to actually work, their neglect of this market makes me very skeptical of any future they have here. Maybe some markets they're a smart option, but not in Louisiana. Sprint sees nothing but a huge void between Houston and Atlanta and I doubt they'll ever change that perspective.

Neither could I... hence the move to big red after 10 years on Sprint... it's worth an extra few bucks a month to be able to use the phone away from wifi and not force roaming on verizon.

Wonder how well the Qchat PTT service works with that ping? This, sadly, is typical of Sprint's 3G speed in Greater Baton Rouge for the past 22 months.... BTW, Verizon still offers anymobile anytime and unlimited texting in BR...

That's the LTE baseband and preamp/LNA. The issue is that the Verizon version's CDMA baseband doesn't support 1xAdvanced. Right now, only the Qualcomm chips do. This means they would have to change the CDMA baseband, and the MDM9600 is the most common one used curently, which also does LTE. They might also be able to use one of the newer QSC chips that will do CDMA 1xA, which is a possibility to retain their own LTE baseband. It would be better actually if they go that route so that everyone will same more battery life running in 3G only mode, which most people do with smaller than 2500 mAh batteries.

The lack of SVDO support is due to using the TI OMAP processor (SoC). The radio baseband used is likely a Qualcomm MDM9600 (like the Rezound, Thunderbolt, iPad3, etc.), which will do CDMA/EVDO/LTE of just about any form. The problem is there is only a single CDMA baseband (and a single LTE baseband). The antenna and "antenna paths" can be shared with no issue. The previously approved LG Viper DOES do SVDO because it undoubtedly uses a Qualcomm SoC processor (Snapdragon S3) with a built-in CDMA baseband along with the MDM9600's. The TWO basebands share the antenna arrays to allow for SVDO usage.

The CDMA baseband will have to be different on the Sprint model if it will support 1xAdvanced. The VIA chip in the VZW version won't do 1xA. That's a good thing though-- there is nothing better than a Qualcomm baseband!

Not either, BOTH! MIMO on EVDO and LTE uses BOTH antennas for receive diversity to improve the bitrate. 1xAdvanced requires Rx diversity to reach 4x 1xRTT capacity as well; without Rx diversity, 1xA has only 3x capacity of 1xRTT.

All the new AT&T LTE phones approved over the past 2 months do support LTE in 700 and AWS-- they're the only phones that support more than one LTE band. They can do this because they only have 2 GSM/GPRS bands to support... Verizon phones in the future will likely be able to do this too, since Verizon only has 2 CDMA bands to carry; however, Sprint has 3 CDMA bands-- so this will be a handset design issue. There cannot be any 800 LTE FIT testing since LTE is not approved to run in ESMR. FCC has granted a waiver for CDMA and EVDO (up to 1.27 MHz carriers) in ESMR only at this point.

They only test to the center of the chosen channel... in other words, for a 5x5 carrier, the center uplink will be 1912.5. Likewise, they only tested down to 1852.5 where the center channel would be of a 5x5 at the very bottom of PCS. This phone's testing is identical to the previously tested LG Viper (LS-840), except that the Viper had to lose its EVDO ESMR ability due to the limited space. I don't see any LTE 800 devices (or dual band LTE devices) until Sprint can give up one of its CDMA bands. Supporting 3 CDMA bands is what is holding this back at this point.

Looks like it supports LTE 1900 and CDMA/EVDO 800/850/1900. Basically just like the LG Viper that was approved 2 months ago, but the GNex will also do EVDO in ESMR that the Viper had to give up for LTE. Guess the 4" screen in the Viper made the form factor too small to support 4 bands in Rx diversity.

Love LTE... that's all I can say... This is during lunch hour where Sprint runs under 10 kbps frequently due to the density of the office buildings here- LTE has so much better scalability-- I think all networks will be much better.

I doubt they'll ever be able to make a single device that will do all the 700 MHz band and there is no way to combine it all into a single band. Band classes 12 & 17 (lower 700 band) used by regionals and AT&T has an offset of 30 MHz (downlink channels are 30 MHz higher than the uplinks). Band class 13 (upper 700 band) used by Verizon has an offset of -31 MHz (downlink channels are 31 MHz LOWER than the uplinks). The RF electronics (diplexers / filters) would be far too complex to do in a single device with present technology. Maybe in a few years someone can design a filter and duplexer circuit that would work without causing interference and cross-operability issues.