Conan Kudo

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.

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.

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. 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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.