Conan Kudo

Sprint still has the advantage of being a Tier 1 global internet access provider and third largest long distance provider in the country. The only national carrier that lacks the advantage of having direct access to the U.S. internet backbone is T-Mobile. I'm not entirely sure of this, but Sprint may also still own about 18% of NII Holdings, which owns all Nextel networks in Latin America. Most of these are now HSPA, but some retain iDEN too. Nextel is still pretty popular in Latin America, and that does bring in some money. Of course, T-Mobile has the advantage of being owned by Deutsche Telekom, if that can be considered one right now (Deutsche Telekom isn't really doing much to help T-Mobile USA). I remember that my home where I grew up in Indiana was wired up by Ameritech, which became SBC when I was about to enter public elementary school. Finally, it became AT&T when I moved to Mississippi. Two years later, it bought BellSouth. Blech.

I believe Starkville is still part of Central MS, which is why we don't have anything really good yet. I know Tupelo is considered part of Northern MS, and it has everything! Great Verizon LTE, good T-Mobile HSPA+, decent AT&T HSPA, decent Sprint 3G, and crappy Verizon CDMA. But that's almost 70 miles north of me. I don't particularly want to drive an hour and a half every time I want to have good cellular performance. If Northern MS is slated for Network Vision upgrades as part of the Memphis market, then I guess I'll see it in Tupelo over the next year... As for the critical writing of Sprint part, I think I now know what to expect. I wish people had noticed my Network Vision piece[1] like they did this. I put a hell lot more work into that one and it really wasn't noticed... The month of May was my Sprint spree. I wrote three articles about Sprint and all were hardly noticed... [1]: http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/129198-network-vision-sprints-path-to-domination

Perhaps so, AJ. But would people please stop calling me anti-Sprint? I'm fair to all carriers, domestic and international. I'm not stupid by any means. And that article was written with what I knew. Honestly, people! I can't write about what I don't know! Most of my information comes from the few people I've been able to talk to about Sprint, and the research I managed to scrounge up for when I wrote my other Sprint articles. Yeah, I've written articles about Sprint before. And no, they weren't "anti-Sprint." I get no credit at all for that, though. Then again, I'm not surprised. Hardly anyone noticed that I wrote those. And insulting me by calling out the fact that I'm an undergraduate student! That was a low blow. The only carriers I truly dislike on a philosophical basis are AT&T and Verizon Wireless. And much of it has nothing to do with mobile networks (business practices, really)! And AJ, I don't have a spectrum scanner like you do, so I have literally no idea how spectrum is actually utilized in the many markets I've visited. Never mind the fact that pretty much all carriers hate my markets and refuse to bring the latest upgrades. Only when I visit other states do I get a chance to check out what these carriers are really bringing to the table. And you know what? It's pretty awesome! I'm impressed with all four carriers. T-Mobile for pushing W-CDMA technology further than anyone else in the world, Sprint for designing a truly modern and advanced infrastructure architecture, AT&T for its broadly deployed Wi-Fi access points, and Verizon Wireless for being one of the first carriers to try to bridge CDMA2000 with LTE on a large scale and managing to largely succeed (brittleness excepted). Do they have bad points? Sure. I'm seriously upset that Sprint is continuing the awful practice of embedding subscriber identity modules instead of making them removable like VZW did. T-Mobile isn't moving fast enough to upgrade its 2G footprint to 3G. AT&T is lying to the public too much about its 4G deployment and firmly backs killing net neutrality. Verizon Wireless' shared data plans are a bad value unless you max out the service options. And CDMA carriers (aside from VZW) need to move faster to deploy HSPA/LTE. VZW needs to get off its butt and finally deploy VoLTE instead of putting it off again. Considering this is literally the first time I've had to deal with the S4GRU community (AJ excepted), I'm not very encouraged.

I would love to be wrong. I really would. But the information I have shows that Sprint isn't putting out enough to offer what others are or will offer. I'll freely admit that I'm a huge T-Mobile advocate, but I regularly use all four carriers (as well as one regional carrier). I'm still angry that T-Mobile doesn't have 3G deployed where I live, and AT&T data performance is mostly acceptable nowadays in Starkville. In my hometown of Clinton, it has issues though. Sprint performance stinks here. Verizon's performance on CDMA is equally bad, while its LTE performance is fantastic. In Jackson (the capital city, right next to my hometown), Sprint performance is pretty good, Verizon CDMA stinks, AT&T HSPA stinks, T-Mobile HSPA+ is excellent, and Verizon LTE is fantastic. If there's information that S4GRU has that is better than what I've got, I would definitely like to know. Until then, I work with what I have.