dmchssc

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People are acting like just because they paid for unlimited data, that they should use it as much as possible. By all means, you should use mobile data if you're out of range of reasonable alternatives. However, pointlessly using data instead of WiFi makes no sense. Where are you personally benefitting there? You're slowing down other people. A cost is placed on others while you gain nothing.

Unlimited mobile data results in a tragedy of the commons situation. It effectively makes data a non-excludable (meaning no restraint on use) but rivalrous (meaning consumption by one makes less avaliable to others) good. The "proper" response to a situation like this is to make data excludable, meaning charges based on the amount of data used. This results in an optimal use of the resource. People who value it at the price of data or more will use it, people who don't will not. If you have a free alternative to using it, you will almost always choose to use that instead.

That is what will have to happen if people irrationally waste the common resource, unless so much of the resource is available that use by one is almost inconsequential. Otherwise, the only way this set up can be retained is if people are conscious of this problem and are willing to at least make free or nearly free decisions that reduce the use of the common resource.

(Take note that no one has said you shouldn't be allowed to use data however you want to. It's whether you should if you have a viable, free alternative. Playing the I paid for it, no one should take it away from me card is a complete non sequitur.)

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@dmchssc its not the wifi sprectrum that is necessarily the limit, it is the bandwidth and utilization of the shared wifi hotspot dsl/t1/cable connection. If you are on your own personal wifi you don't have to share, but you still paying one way or another.

Yes, but wi-fi access-points tend to have much more available bandwidth per person than cellular connections. 10 mbps divided between users in a 20m radius vs 30-40 mbps (in Sprint's case) divided between users in each sector of a cell with a radius of several kilometers.

Also, it still doesn't cost anything to use your own connection. You've already paid for it. You'd pay for it regardless of your decision to use wifi or not on your smartphone. There's no additional cost for you, but social costs are reduced.

I have to call BS on this argument.

 

First, unless you are offloading onto some sprint sponsored wifi, the wifi bandwidth you use has to be paid for by someone. If you are using your home wifi, that bandwidth is being paid for by you and your isp. News just recently about cox and re-rolling out capped bandwidth on their cable network. ATT already caps their dsl, and no doubt other major internet providers are considering the practice, at least until if/when the FCC steps up and starts putting pressure against tiered/capped internet.

The difference is in the marginal cost of bandwidth usage. On wifi, you're consuming a time-slice of 20-40 mhz of free-to-use wireless spectrum that affects a small area. Most of the time, you're using an otherwise un-utilized resource, making the marginal cost zero if the router is pre-existing. Then, you're using a broadband home ISP connection. Those are typically paid for with a flat fee upfront. Again, a marginal cost of zero.

On a cellular data connection, you're consuming a time/frequency slice of expensive, licensed wireless spectrum. Your use of it takes away its availability to be used by others on the same tower/sector as you. It affects hundreds of times more people than using wifi. The marginal cost is the reduction in speeds experienced by subscribers who don't have an offloading option. To mitigate this, Sprint has to spend more on spectrum and network infrastructure to increase site density and wireless bandwidth per site. If the cost of doing this is too much, Sprint will either get rid of unlimited data (to cut expenditure needs) or raise rates (to pay the increased costs).

So, yes, you did pay to use cellular data even when you have other (generally better) connectivity options, but by doing so, you're needlessly increasing social costs (putting negative pressure on the availability of unlimited data and slowing other users down) while doing little to nothing to reduce your own costs. If Wi-Fi would be a faster option and would drain your battery more slowly, than you'd be increasing your own costs.

Best case, it's anti-social; worst case, it's completely irrational.

Got 4G in the Common today, up close to the street on the Beacon Hill side.

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Not that it matters at all for American carriers, but this isn't the first mass-market phone to support EVDO Rev. B. I remember the stink people were making when the Epic 4G Touch came out without Rev. B support. The EVO 3D, the last Sprint phone to be released before the E4GT, supported Rev. B. People were concerned that Sprint was planning on a Rev. B rollout and that Epic 4G Touch users would be left out.

I agree with some parts of the verdict. TouchWiz 3.0 blatantly mimics iOS in a lot of respects, and the original Galaxy S is slightly too close for comfort (in my opinion) in design to the iPhone 3G. However, I don't believe that specific phone was covered in the trial, since the i9000 was never sold in the US. All of the Samsung TouchWiz phones before the Galaxy S II have the TouchWiz 3.0 UI though.

The things I don't agree with are any of the claims against the tablets, and the idiotically simple patents like tap to zoom and pinch to zoom. Seriously, people?!

Neither MetroPCS nor Cricket are true nationwide carriers. They both offer native coverage in select metropolitan areas and regions and then resell Sprint service everywhere else. To the user, when on Sprint's network, it looks like they are still on the home network. Metro and Cricket have different retail/marketing strategies in the areas they have native coverage and where they do not.

I believe MetroPCS also has a roaming agreement with Verizon, but it shows up as roaming to the user, and roaming minutes are not included in their plans. Roaming calls cost $0.19 per minute.

Metro and Cricket are probably only deploying LTE in the areas where they already have native coverage.

I'm in the same zip code, but my 3G speeds leave much to be desired. The tower at Racetrack and 13 especially seems to struggle at peak times.

Higher frequency signals, like the ones Sprint uses, tend to fluctuate more than lower frequency signals. This is because of wavelength and weaker propagation. Even a small shift in the device's position or a change in the positions of the objects in the signal's path can cause the instantaneous signal strength to swing by 20 dBm or more. If the device is on a call or active data session, a few packets or frames may be lost, but the connection generally doesn't drop because the strongest drops tend to be short-lived, and oftentimes there are alternative cells to connect to.

However, when there is no active connection, a deep signal drop could trigger the phone to look for a roaming signal, even if the drop is just from fluctuation. It depends on the threshold (the higher the threshold, the more likely the signal will drop below it), and the algorithm that smooths signal strength readings over a period of time. Algorithms that have short time windows and weight the most recent reading heavily will cause the displayed signal to fluctuate more widely than ones that try to average the strength over a longer period of time.

I think the Galaxy S III has both a higher roaming threshold and a shorter sample window than the Epic 4G Touch did. Because of this, it is more likely to roam when in an area where signal strength is relatively weak and tends to fluctuate. If this is indeed the case, personally, I like the higher threshold, but feel like the raw signal strength should be more temporally smoothed.

As long as the network can handle the extra users, or can be upgraded to do so cost-effectively, it makes perfect sense. More customers means more revenue, which Sprint still desperately needs.

I did try a Verizon PRL, actually, but it had a lot of trouble staying on EVDO, and it would take a long time to reestablish data on 1x. Then in would join EVDO again and the cycle continued.

I was traveling about a week ago, and when traveling through some rural areas with native Sprint coverage, my 3G speeds were horrible. 20-30 kbps and pings around 500 ms. I decided to switch my phone to 1x only mode as an experiment. With 1x, my speeds went up to a consistent 130 kbps but with higher pings. So, EVDO exhibited heavy strain, whereas 1x was close to its full capabilities.

Does 1x get a higher priority of access to back haul than EVDO because of its typical voice traffic?

Why was Band 17 created separately from Band 12 anyway? Was it that much cheaper/efficient to drop support for the A Block, or was it mostly AT&T deciding it didn't want its phones to be interoperable with regional carriers' LTE?

I don't mean domestic roaming necessarily, just the potential to roam on GSM networks internationally and/or use a foreign sim card.

Verizon recently announced that it's version of the SGS III will support roaming on 2g and 3g gsm networks abroad after a software update. Because the Sprint and Verizon versions will be identical, except for the PCS vs 700mhz LTE antennas, does this mean that the Sprint version will potentially support GSM as well?

Does this mean they're adding AWS CDMA support to the iPhone, or will Leap just essentially be a Sprint MVNO in AWS only Cricket markets?

Does this mean that all of these towers are activated for general use, or are towers still limited to internal testing shown on the map?

Will there be any more neighborhood by neighborhood breakdowns for Network Vision rollouts in primary markets like there was for Chicago? I'm particularly interested in Boston.