greenbastard

Is this the same guy with the terrible track record?

Better to have one carrier with lower prices than two. They're not against the merger at all.

I don't know where y'all got this idea that At&t and Verizon are lobbying against the merger. They're not. This merger is good for them.

ENDC. And let's not pretend that 5G was the reason Sprint didn't deploy their entire 2.5-2.6 GHz spectrum. It was a wasted opportunity at showing amazing DL speeds during the 4G era.

I hope not. IMO, the Magicbox has been the product of Sprint further wasting spectrum. They should have deployed all of it by now. T-Mobile should just move forward with their Cellspot option on B4.

I'm going to go ahead and say yes. All the 5G markets currently have VoLTE. So falling back to LTE for phone calls seems like the logical thing to do.

I guess Sprint wants to see the reaction from the media/customers before announcing anything concrete. If there is an extra charge for 5G on old plans, I'd be shocked.

Then I don't get what you're trying to say.

This has been my experience as well. Small Cells are not a good way of filling coverage holes (particularly for B41 and indoor coverage). Small Cells are only useful for balancing congestion. Take T-Mobile as an example. They added Macro sites to fill weak coverage areas where you would lose LTE. Afterwards, they looked at all their congested sectors and added small cells as a form of relief. They mostly focused on areas with high concentrations of people (apartments, shopping centers, schools, etc.) and speeds have improved. They still have a long way to go, but their strategy is, hands down, the best way of tackling both coverage and congestion.

I assumed it was a given that when we talked about "Urban", we also meant suburban America. For the purpose of this discussion, suburbs and downtown areas are all "urbanized" areas while a site on I-10 near Sonora, TX is rural. Sorry for the confusion.

https://s4gru.com/?app=core&module=system&controller=content&do=find&content_class=forums_Topic&content_id=7845&content_commentid=542352 You should be a bit more articulate and consistent in your discourse.

They would still need to densify with new macro towers to fill gaps. Small cells aren't going to cut it I have not seen Sprint add a macro tower since pre-NV days in Texas. Small cells are no good for filling gaps due to their limited range and indoor usability. Small cells are only good for fighting congestion in small shopping centers, schools, or apartments.

Like I said, that's not how the wireless industry works. Most spending already happens in urban areas. To suggest that half of Sprint's CAPEX should go towards rural areas for one year is a terrible strategy.

That's not a solution. In this industry, you can't just spend one year and hope that's good enough for the next few years. That's not how this works. Doing what you're suggesting is the exact reason why Sprint is in the hole they are in to begin with. After NV 1.0, they left a lot of sites untouched in major urban areas and congestion crept up to them. B41 is great, but due to its coverage limitations Sprint needed to densify it's network. They didn't. And it bit them in the butt. You need consistent CAPEX in order to compete and gain customers (and keept those customers).

Tesla isn't Sprint though.