Conan Kudo

There's nothing different about them except for packaging. I bought a Ting SIM for my Nexus 5, and it's just a plain Sprint SIM that just isn't registered to anything yet inside of a wrapper with Ting's name on it. A dual-SIM handset with CDMA/GSM is unlikely here, unfortunately. VoLTE does not allow for portability across carriers, as it must be implemented using carrier customized firmware, so that makes multi-carrier VoLTE unlikely.

It's not possible because Sprint's infrastructure doesn't support custom SIM cards, principally because Sprint doesn't use SIM cards the way that 3GPP only operators do. It's technically possible for someone to craft a custom SIM that authorizes AT&T and T-Mobile as if it was one network, or AT&T+T-Mobile GSM/WCDMA/LTE and Verizon LTE as one network because those networks follow the same standards and practices for network/subscriber authentication and management.

That's for the 4/$100 offer. That's not the same as the 2/$100 fully unlimited offer.

Getting details out of them is like pulling teeth sometimes...

Kamen Rider

Dark times

interesting times

Shadow Game (闇のゲーム) 闇の扉が開かれた。

Call home

Shark soup

Similarly, I do respect A.J.'s intelligence and his analytical ability. Our points of view differ due to how we examine the same type of business. I wouldn't necessarily classify it as "Eurasian-centric", but rather "global centric", but take it for what you wish. For what it's worth, we have worked together (and continue to do so) on ideas and proposals regarding the future of spectrum in the United States. Despite our differences, we do get along well and manage to resolve them into something useful and interesting. Now, onto the Band 41 comment of his... Let me predicate this on the simple fact that I don't "hate"/"dislike"/etc. Band 41. It's a perfectly suitable band. However, I will acknowledge that Band 38 (the subset of it) has much larger scale, being used across Europe and the Middle East. Does that mean I necessarily prefer Band 38 over Band 41? No. However, I would prefer that the U.S. band plan for 2.6GHz be reorganized to something that is more useful and usable for a wider number of parties. It goes without saying that the band plan for 2496-2690 MHz is incredibly screwed up. I would like to see it fixed up so that it would be more attractive to use by more companies, enabling more competition in the high-capacity wireless system market. I'd like to see a band plan that preserves Sprint's ability to launch up to three 20MHz TDD carriers with the remainder being auctioned for FDD and TDD operations by other parties. That would be a Band 7+41 band plan, with Sprint and others having some blocks that also fit in the Band 38 range so that they can take advantage of economic scale and inbound roaming opportunities there. Band 7 is used all over the world to offer high capacity FDD operations, and enabling other players in the market to be able to go after that opportunity would be good for competition. And as for 700MHz, it is pretty screwed up in its own right. The 698-806 MHz band has had a long and storied history of being released piecemeal, which led to the convoluted and spectrally inefficient band plan we have today. It's very clear that no one really thought about the consequences of releasing frequencies the way it was done, which led to the issues we have today. Because of this, the Asia-Pacific Telecommunity (APT, the frequency regulator for Asia and Oceania) worked very hard with CITEL (the frequency regulator for the Americas) and CEPT (the one for Europe and Africa) to design a better band plan to be used by countries all over the world. At the end of 2012, APT submitted the band plan to 3GPP to be designated as an official band for E-UTRA, and it received the designation as band 28. Shortly after that, the APT band plan was selected for 700MHz across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. In fact, only the US and Canada have not chosen the APT plan. Sprint's parent, SoftBank Mobile, has a band 28 license and will be rolling out its 700MHz "platinum band" LTE network when the frequencies are released in January. While it is true that there are more devices for US 700MHz now, this will not remain true in the next two years. With the APT band plan, the 700MHz band can support nine 5MHz FDD blocks. Depending on how the reconfiguration is structured, it could enable another auction of some 700MHz blocks on a national basis. And with the new band plan, all interoperability issues and DTV interference issues go away. As for being in sync with other countries, it offers major economic advantages to consumers and to operators. Smaller scale businesses are more sustainable, because they can rely on the indirect scale available from the total market, rather than having to create its own scale by some other means. And with telecom being a business of scale, this is hugely beneficial. Say A.J., Robert, and I wanted to build an operation together. If our frequencies conform to the design used by larger players all over the world, we can simply request those designs to use for our systems and take advantage of the design and cost advantages of buying something already available and well-scaled. For our customers, it would mean that our devices and systems would be cheaper, allowing our lower costs to enable savings to them. Perhaps what might cost us hundreds of millions of dollars for a unique system would only be tens of millions of dollars instead. Still big numbers, but substantially cheaper. This is what makes GSM so successful. That global scale enables certain advantages to even new entrants, provided they are able to work within the framework that others have dug into. We see this in the U.S. on a smaller scale with operators like Bluegrass Cellular and Pioneer Cellular firmly sunk into the Verizon ecosystem as part of the LTE in Rural America program, or Piedmont Telephone Cellular and AT&T (prior to Piedmont selling its systems to AT&T and moving to be a "managing partner" like how King Street is to USCC). As it gets more and more expensive to provide high-quality service, the "global scale" part of the equation matters more and more. Verizon's aggressive moves to kill its reliance on CDMA for its B2C and B2B operations are very much indicative of this.

Actually, you're completely wrong on the premise that WCDMA was designed for greenfield deployment. The first deployment in the world was a refarm deployment on 850MHz in Japan. NTT DoCoMo designed the system to in that context, since Japan had not yet decided on whether it would follow the US band plan further or switch to the same band plan followed by mainland Asia for new bands, or that it would even release new frequencies at all (eventually, Japan moved toward the band plan followed by mainland Asia for new frequencies, as we know today). And when WCDMA was initially standardized, Cellular 850/900, DCS, and PCS were supported. IMT (band 1) was added at the tail end for Europe, which auctioned DCS in tiny 2.5MHz FDD slivers originally. The United States' PCS band was fully capable of supporting WCDMA with wide 15MHz FDD channels on PCS A/B/C and 5MHz FDD channels on PCS D/E/F. And why the world would I blame the FCC for not being able to auction IMT frequencies? PCS channels were wide enough anyway, and failing that, 850MHz was also wide enough to support WCDMA, too. The FCC was remarkably forward thinking when they released large blocks instead of tiny ones. Sprint doesn't use EvDO Rev B with Phase II enhancements (EvDO RevB Phase II has never been deployed). Sprint only uses EvDO Rev A, so the numbers are worse. EvDO RevB Phase II supports up to 14Mbps with 4 contiguous EvDO Rev B carriers aggregated together. Average speeds of Phase II (at least from trial documents) were around 2Mbps. With Phase I, it's only at 9Mbps, with average speeds at 1Mbps. And EvDO Rev A doesn't support aggregating contiguous carriers. EvDO Rev A peaked at 3Mbps and averaged at 400Kbps.

The other way to look at it is that T-Mobile gets 2x the peak performance for 5MHz FDD and 10x the average performance of EvDO (with Rev B and Phase II enhancements) with HSPA+. EvDO Rev A is much worse than this (7x peak performance, 30x average performance). Additionally, what gave you the dumb idea that 3GPP is "non-American friendly"? ATIS and CITEL have been strongly involved in the GSMA and 3GPP to represent the needs of operators across the Americas since the beginning of GSM rollouts in the Americas in 1993. Heck, the FCC has never auctioned a block of spectrum for CMRS that is so small that you can't roll out WCDMA on it. Asian countries were more likely to offer small blocks than Americans. For example, India releases DCS spectrum in 250kHz FDD blocks! Some countries release in 4.4MHz FDD increments, too. So that reasoning is complete B.S. The smallest block the FCC has released is 5MHz FDD, and many blocks were larger. And if you needed to roll it out on a smaller chunk of spectrum, you could compress a WCDMA carrier to as small as 3.8MHz FDD, which would offer a peak rate of 16Mbps (as opposed to 21Mbps) without WCDMA+ features. Even at that rate, EvDO is still less efficient than WCDMA. Throw in WCDMA+, and you get 21Mbps again, even at 3.8MHz FDD. A decent argument can be made to say that CDMA2000 is more wasteful than WCDMA on a spectral efficiency basis, simply due to the technical advantages of the WCDMA platform. Not only that, CDMA2000 implementations are a strong enabler of "operator domination", which Americans don't like, since it involves restricting their freedom on how to use the service they pay for.

That depends on where you are. Where I've been, T-Mobile's HSPA+ easily hits 10-15Mbps all the time, with sometimes peaking at 20Mbps. If T-Mobile has compressed its WCDMA carrier sizes, though, you will see some drops in performance. However, in general, the experience is more of a backhaul thing than an airlink thing.

The difference, of course, is that T-Mobile's non-LTE phones are capable of using T-Mobile's HSPA+ network, which offers a decent experience for people too. Sprint doesn't have that option, so it pushes harder to upsell to LTE devices.

Insofar as the reputation is concerned, it will always show what you can get as if you had unlimited full speed data. No more, no less. For customers, unless they use the upcoming speed test application being provided by T-Mobile for the purpose of evaluating throttled speed, they will see the true performance of the cell site(s) they are connected to. Since T-Mobile now relies on this data to check network performance in real time, speed tests that show weak performance consistently will trigger action on T-Mobile's end. So, if something indicates that T-Mobile isn't the fastest (or fast at all) consistently, then T-Mobile will evaluate the location and work to improve the situation.

Rocks Cluster