Conan Kudo

I have a question for someone on here who has T-Mobile service...why is it that whenever a carrier like Verizon or AT&T makes changes to their data offerings and it makes the news. Why is it always comments from T-Mobile customers that state how much data that have used either last billing cycle or currently or data speeds they are getting? I just never understood what that has to do with the topic of the article?

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Humblebragging or just plain old bragging, mainly... I don't advertise how much data I use, but there are those who do.

What does Murdoch have to deal with Chicago 700a??

The DTV 51 station in Gary, IN that has an exclusion zone the encompasses the entire Chicago BEA is owned by Fox Television Studios, a division of 21st Century Fox, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch.

Rupert may be an actual dinosaur when that auction finally happens.

As if he isn't already one now? It's not like people see the guy very often anymore...

I'll add that a T-Mobile reddit user found a petition by AT&T to use 700 MHz A in Rockford. The 700 A license for Chicago could well end up in the hands of AT&T.

Well, the problem with the Chicago license is that Rupert Murdoch has absolutely no reason to cooperate with the wireless carriers. He makes more than enough money to be able to reject any offer made. And he'd prefer to see mobile wither in favor of TV anyway. AT&T would probably not want to deal with that poison, but it may not have a choice.

I want to port my number to Google voice. I understand this will terminate the Sprint account. Has anyone been successful in getting sprint to re-activate the account with a new number, instead of paying the ETF and starting over with a new plan ? 

 

I've read user reports with other carriers where they ported their number, and were able to call customer service and get the account re-instated with a new number. 

Do you have a particular reason for doing this? Sprint provides Google Voice integration.

I see that as a possibility, but I sure hope that T-Mobile will just join the CCA/RRPP instead.

 

 

Sent from Josh's iPhone 6+ using Tapatalk 3.1.1

If that were to force T-Mobile to support CDMA, there's no way in hell it would subject itself to that kind of cost increase. Only if it made it so all upcoming Sprint devices supported GSM/WCDMA instead (there's a spec for CDMA devices to roam on GSM/WCDMA freely, just not the other way back due to 3GPP networks not being able to supply the PRLs and such).

True, It is funny though. They are selling 10 billion in assets, and the bill for aws auction is 10 billion

Verizon actually sold $15.54 billion in assets to recover from the auction and to pay for the $5 billion share repurchase commitment.

It's getting $10.54 billion for the Verizon wireline assets outside of the Northeast corridor, and it's getting $5 billion to sell American Tower the rights to a majority of Verizon's towers that it owns (I think it's 70% of the towers it owns, but I'm not sure).

I'm hoping this is finally the start of the move to C-SIM. That would be a nice change. 

It would be, but honestly, I don't know if Sprint would do that. It seems somewhat unlikely, given their past and the lack of terms that mandate it.

Well this is news.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Sprint/comments/2ut91c/clarifying_ctia_and_sprints_unlock_policy/

 

5S/5C/6/6+ and all phones released after 2/19 will be automatically unlocked at the end of the 2-year contract or device installment plan. Looks like current Android phones won't be getting any unlock love.

Amazing, Sprint is doing something consumer-friendly for iPhones! But as for the rest of us, it looks like we get no love for now...

Is it possible to run TDD on those unpaired block?

No. Power limits designate it as uplink-only.

I gotta ask - who's first computer was a Tandy from Radio Shack?

I had a Tandy 1000 HX and an IBM PC XT at around the same time. Got the Tandy from a Radio Shack throw out (that is, they were throwing out the overstock and didn't care who took them, since the computers had been discontinued for several years already). I remember being stumped about why I couldn't install applications to C:\. I didn't find out about DOS being on a ROM chip until much later.

My dad's IBM PC XT was from the university he worked for. Both machines were pretty interesting to mess around with...

sign language

John got a hard recoil off this... His mentions? Not pretty. And you had the Magentan employees running at people who insulted Kim K... Pretty weird. I was the only one who made the SoftBank connection between them both. I'm amazed at the amount of people who get amped up about this sort of thing.

Meh. I don't particularly care for Kim Kardashian West, but I did play around with the advert site they launched, simply because it was so technically interesting. Sure, I got polluted with a few mentions with Kim's "stash" of images, but the technology was still very cool.

When I get a chance I will look for it and post but a couple of years ago the State of North Carolina scrapped local franchise agreements and instituted statewide franchise agreements  with the goal of increasing internet availability, service and competition.

That'll be interesting if it's true, because Google would have just signed one of those in order to provide service in Raleigh.

A lot of laws barring new broadband deployment projects were written to reference the FCC's definition of broadband. The interesting aspect of that is with the redefinition, some places can now build public/private partnerships to build new fiber or cable networks to support broadband where there is no longer any.

AT&T has 850MHz in the south of the country only.

Yes, but the Southern half of the country is where most of the population is already. So AT&T can afford to have a skeleton network there until it absolutely wants to. Plus, if the Telmex assets (which will include cellular and fixed assets) being sold off are in the parts that Iusacell doesn't operate 850MHz networks today, AT&T can just get those and use them instead. AT&T has a ton of alternatives to just paying for rebanding and using SMR for LTE.

Yes that's correct, Band 27 does span both upper and lower.  But that does not change my point regarding it having no bearing on interfering with Sprint either way in the IBEZ regardless of Band used in Mexico.

Sort of. If AT&T controls the SMR band, they'll slow down the relocation process as much as possible. Because AT&T controls Iusacell, they have no impending need for the SMR frequencies due to its control of most of the Cellular 850 licenses that it needs. NII Holdings had a very strong need to get it done quickly in order to become competitive. Under AT&T, that's not necessary.

But you are right in that the band class AT&T ultimately chooses has no bearing on the IBEZ question.

That a third world country has so much vacant spectrum it can pick and swap among various bands is not my concern.  I simply do not care.  Neal can be the international guy.  But what the rest of the world does in spectrum policy has essentially no bearing on what the US does.

 

AJ

 

As much as you wish that to be true, it's not. Especially with border regions. You inherently know this (and to a certain degree, accept this) because otherwise the IBEZ situation wouldn't exist. Spectrum and telecommunications is all about harmonization and scale, be it domestically or transnationally. You don't have to like it, but you can't ignore it.

Secondly, "third world" is an old term to use. We're not in the Cold War. "First world" relating to US/NATO allies, "second world" relating to Soviet Union/CIS allies, and "third world" for unaligned countries. It doesn't actually represent the state of the country, only a political affiliation that no longer applies in any significant manner.

The UMS is a fairly well-developed country (with a high HDI and industrialization recently completed), though admittedly it has some major crime problems and polarized wealth distribution. But then again, so does the USA.

They will either need to use Band 26 or Band 27.  Or possibly both.  Band 27 is lower SMR, Band 26 is upper.  If they do not line up to either of these, then they will spend years going through the 3GPP and get a new band created.

 

If they only use Band 27, then they won't be interfering with Sprint Band 26 across the border at all.  But I think it's highly unlikely they have no upper SMR holdings at all.  So they are likely going to be using Band 26 for the upper SMR band.  The question then really is whether they will also use some lower SMR band holdings as well.

The difference between Band 27 and Band 26 is that Band 27 spans the entire SMR band, while Band 26 instead spans the upper SMR band and the Cellular 850 band. For AT&T, Band 27 is ideal because it screws with Sprint and allows AT&T to maintain the bifurcated band classes. Alternatively, AT&T could choose to ask SCT to exchange SMR for Band 28 (APT 700MHz FDD) spectrum, making the whole thing the government's problem instead.

Welp, it wasn't that bad. Shoveling snow out of my driveway for the second time in the same week sucked, but at least this time I didn't do it alone (one of my roommates helped out, which made it much quicker and easier). I only saw 4 inches of snow where I was, so I didn't get much of the fabled "20-40 inches of snow" we were originally supposed to get.

I've only been here almost three weeks. Definitely not prepared for this yet...

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.

FYI: Broadcasters in Europe have 8MHz channels, not 6MHz. And there are fewer broadcasters per country, as well. On a per state basis, we still have slightly more operating broadcasters than any individual European country, but we do have fewer "transmitters" than they do.

So why couldn't sprint use that mechanism for its volte to 1x transitions?

Because the only reason it works is because Wi-Fi is a second radio. Since there's only one cellular radio, you can't be simultaneously connected to multiple cellular systems.

Soooo lemme get this straight... He talks about all the ads with the deals designed to atract new customers and then goes off to say that only current T-Mobile customers that have paid their bill on time for a year qualify? All the new customers will still have to deal with large down payments when switching.

They weren't going to get better down payment deals elsewhere anyway. This gives them a path to getting good deals later. Hell, if they've bought a phone upfront to hold onto for a year, they can save some money while they prepare for that date in which they are moved to the "prime" bucket.

But this also affects all existing customers that haven't been re-evaluated. This will drastically raise the prime to subprime mix from ~55% to probably around 70% or so.

I thought Qualcomm had basically stopped charging a premium for CDMA capability. Thought the Qualcomm pitch was now something like "you can buy from no-name semiconductor over there, or you can pay only a few pennies more and get a genuine Qualcomm chip, and as a bonus, it is also CDMA capable."

No. Qualcomm can't do something like that, since CDMA royalties make up most of its revenue. While the royalties for its OFDMA related inventions aren't insignificant, they are far smaller than the ones for CDMA technology. And inventions for E-UTRA and UTRA FDD/TDD are required to be offered under FRAND terms, so Qualcomm doesn't make nearly as much money on it as it does for cdmaOne/CDMA2000 technology.

Yeah, we have been discussing this tablet for a few days now in our behind the scenes FCC OET staff thread.  Be aware that it is 3GPP only.  So, it does support bands 25/26/41, but it does not support any CDMA2000 whatsoever -- if that matters to you.

 

Since cellular tablets eschew voice capability, I expect to see more and more be 3GPP only.  In and of itself, that is not necessarily bad -- even for Sprint.  However, if you want quality Qualcomm baseband chipsets in these tablets, you may get cut rate 3GPP only baseband chipsets instead.  For example, see the Nexus 9.

 

Just FYI... 

 

AJ

There are plenty of high-quality non-Qualcomm Gobi baseband chipsets out there in the 3GPP space.

For example, Intel (formerly Infineon), NVIDIA Icera, and Samsung Exynos Modem are all basebands that are excellent. Some of them were even ahead of Qualcomm in the past (Intel and Icera both supported carrier aggregation before Qualcomm did, and DC-HSPA+ was implemented by ST-Ericsson before Qualcomm).

The amount of competition in the 3GPP baseband space basically prevents subpar chips from becoming successful, which is why VIA Telecom has no share in the 3GPP market (they sell GSM-only radios for the Chinese market, but no ODM uses them).

So I would say modems used by these devices (Icera in the Nexus 9, for instance) are not necessarily "cut-rate". They work very well, indeed.