greenbastard

It's probably nothing. "Uncarrier" announcements have been worthless PR stunts for a while now.

I don't have a Sprint phone to check, but does this mean Sprint Small Cells are no longer operational? IIRC, 160 Mhz was all the EBS/BRS spectrum Sprint owned in Houston. (I remember reading they owned or had leases for the entire EBS/BRS Band, but I don't feel like searching the FCC site to verify this.) Not turning off the small cells using LTE UE Relay for backhaul (which is all of them AFAIK) could create issues if all Sprint owned in Houston was 160 Mhz.

All the 600 Mhz sites in my area were already part of a very dense network, so coverage was never an issue. It seems like every 600 Mhz upgrade was for capacity issues since T-Mobile was also deploying the 5x5 block they had in the AWS-3 band.

One thing I do like about T-Mobile is that they really put a lot of energy into taking care of Houston. T-Mobile pulled a bunch of permits from the City of Houston on June 10. Seems like they're not sitting on those permits (which Sprint used to do). From the few towers I checked, it seems like they are prioritizing towers that were left behind during the 600 Mhz upgrades first. The towers that received the first round of 600 Mhz upgrades have not had any permits submitted.

If there is a purchase option on the current T-Mobile leases, then there probably won't be much of a bidding war.

Any area where West Central Wireless owns spectrum will be an area were T-Mobile is severely spectrum constrained. I wouldn't recommend anyone touch T-Mobile if they plan to live in San Angelo.

1st world problems. But seriously, HD voice calling between T-Mobile and Sprint are still a hit or miss for me. I was surprised when a friend called me from his Sprint line a couple of months ago and it sounded very clear (way clearer than VoIP gaming solutions such as Discord). All of our calls are HD since then. But when I call my sister, no HD. VoLTE works fine on her phone, but just no HD.

Let's not forget that when TMUS throws a tower online, they brag about the entire market getting some love. They did this with their LTE launch, B12 deployment, B71 deployment, and now n41 deployment. It will probably be months before n41 becomes widespread in Houston or Los Angeles.

Partly the same in Houston. T-Mobile has vacated Dish's spectrum. LTE last night was at 15x15 (all leased spectrum; 10x10 Mhz Columbia + 5x5 Mhz Dish spectrum). Today, only Columbia's 10x10 spectrum is being used. As far as NR, I'm not sure if leases are still active (or if they ever were) since I don't have a 5G Phone. T-Mobile's spectrum (10x10 MHz) was located between Comcast (5x5 MHz) and Bluewater (5x5 MHz) spectrum. Both of those companies loaned T-Mobile spectrum during the pandemic. I'm just not sure the terms of those leases.

Completely different story on Hwy 71. Once you cross Hwy 281, it's all 1x roaming for Sprint until you hit San Angelo (I'm sure that has changed now with T-Mobile roaming). Another weak area for both carriers are the back roads around Canyon Lake. IIRC, Sprint and T-Mobile didn't have any native signal out near Canyon Lake HS (which is a school that services the huge region). Considering the demographics of the region, I'm not surprised. The area is too affluent, very rural-ish, and a topographical nightmare to properly cover.

Both carriers are pretty subpar out in the hill country when compared to At&t. I was pleasantly surprised to see Sprint have native coverage between San Marcos and Wimberley. It's definitely way better than T-Mobile and it's dead zones (even though T-Mobile claims to cover that area as well). It will be interesting to see if TMUS keeps Sprint towers in that entire region. They have the better network out there, even though TMUS claims to have bigger coverage out there.

My service is back up and running as of 10:16 PM Central. VoLTE is up and SMS all poured in at the same time. According to Cloudfare's CEO, the issue started when T-Mobile was doing network configurations. https://mobile.twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1272678168638500864

Users from all major carriers are now reporting one issue or another. Lots of people on social media chattering about a DDOS attack. Seems like a routing issue of some sort.

I wonder if these will be activated as T-Mobile phones and have absolutely no access to the Sprint network?

5G coverage maps are actually gone from the Sprint site. I wonder if T-Mobile has started installing panels in Sprint's original 5G markets?