greenbastard

On 11/22/2020 at 8:14 AM, jbahlman said:

Has anyone had issues with calls that connect but either one side or both can't hear.  Over the last week i have had several times with my wife and my son that this has happened.  One time rebooting my phone fixed it and another time my son rebooted his phone.  I live in Northern Va. Each time we have tried multiple calls and no luck.  But so far it has only happened with calls between us not with work or other calls.

I usually have this happen whenever I switch from the native T-Mobile 310-260 PLMN to the 311-490 PLMN (and vice versa). Usually toggling airplane mode fixes the issue.

17 hours ago, iansltx said:

Any idea of what T-Mobile's AT&T roaming agreement looks like? The Sprint one is apparently area limited at 256 kbps. While that's not great, it's better than nothing...or 1x.

It is a much smaller agreement that keeps getting smaller. Sprint has a larger and more widespread roaming agreement with at&t.

Even if your were to stumble into the rare at&t roaming area, your going to be throttled to 128 kbps.

7 hours ago, RedSpark said:

 

 

Industry-Leading Customer Growth

• Record-high 2,035,000 total net additions, best in industry
• Record-high 1,979,000 postpaid net additions, best in industry
• 689,000 postpaid phone net additions, best in industry

Let's not forget all those free lines they gave away in the summer. I got two of them with no strings attached to my plan. I slipped one SIM in an old phone to use as a car tracker and the other SIM is sitting in a drawer.

7 hours ago, PedroDaGr8 said:

I hate to say it but blame your NIMBY neighbors. Permits are a lot easier/quicker in bad areas because there is less objection. 

Or maybe the demand for data is heavier in these areas, so priority is given. Let's not forget that in low income areas, cellphone data is the only source of internet access for many households.

5 hours ago, bmoses said:

has anyone had recent tower upgrades in their area where they installed the b/n41 panels but did NOT install the b/n71 panels?

They are in my area doing upgrades right now and they have been putting both b/n41 as well as b/n71 up on the tower with each upgrade. However I've found 2 towers now where crews have been there and are gone now where they only put up the b/n41 panel and not the b/n71 panel. trying to guess the reasons they would do that?

I've seen B41/n41 upgrades on a tower that was already upgraded with B71. But on both occasions, T-Mobile didn't touch the older 3 sector B2/B4 panels, which is odd since T-Mobile has already gone through two B2/B4 equipment upgrades on most of the market.

2 hours ago, iansltx said:

Went on an expedition this evening to check out the two sites in the Austin area that have n41.

In both cases they were running B41 as well. The first one was colo'd with Sprint, so they were running 100 MHz of 2.5 off of the site (60 TMo, 40 Sprint). The second wasn't; I was able to get a -123 signal from the nearest Sprint B41.

I maxed out around 100 Mbps down on both, with B41 downloads basically as fast as n41 (uploads were faster). Hopefully they get the backhaul in gear. Site range was a mile or so. Had CellMapper turned on for part of the trip so y'all can check my work

So T-Mobile+Sprint only have access to 100 MHz of the BRS/EBS band in Williamson county?

That would be disappointing. Were you able to confirm if it was all contiguous?

5 hours ago, RedSpark said:

Neville responded to the report:

Define "consumer device". Does that include home modems/routers?

This story is a huge nothingburger. All three carriers already carry chinese phones with chinese components. Any phone sold under the T-Mobile or Revvl brand will be a Chinese phone. You will still be able to buy your Apple iPhones and Samsung Galaxies.

2 hours ago, RedSpark said:

How could this even be a possibility?:

I can't imagine there wasn't a merger condition prohibiting this very thing from happening. Perhaps it wasn't enough of a deterrent if this is even being floated or discussed out there.

https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-approves-t-mobilesprint-transaction-conditions

I think they're talking about the Revvl line of phones (which is currently made by TCL iirc). Not that big of a deal tbh.

On 10/9/2020 at 9:32 PM, Dkoellerwx said:

Probably not needed yet. Haven't seen any of those in this region.

It seems that's all they're doing around Houston. Every n41/B41 installation comes with a Nokia AAFIA-MIMO installation.

They seem to perform worse in coverage than the equipment they're replacing.

8 hours ago, jthawks said:

Here is newly upgraded site.

Sent from my SM-G986U using Tapatalk
 

No AWS/PCS massive MIMO?

On 10/3/2020 at 10:07 PM, iansltx said:

Based on the "toggle 5G off and look for the different color" trick on the T-Mobile map, appears that there are two n41 sites in the Austin area. One around Cedar Park, one near Round Rock.

The one in RR (monopole site) is near Sam Bass Road and Hermitage Dr in Round Rock (near the parking lot of the shopping center First Star Bank is in). The other (full-on big ol' tower near CP) is near where Lone Star Dr turns north to meet W Whitestone Blvd (aka 1431).

Maybe I'll decide next week that it's a good day to take a 20-mile bike ride and check 'em out, if someone doesn't beat me to doing the field testing. Doesn't look like either of 'e cover a super dense area, so I imagine speeds should be solid.

That map has not been updated to show the rapid rate of upgrades in Houston. If I had to guess, this map was last updated in mid to late August. 

7 hours ago, smj9 said:

I just learned something new; the existing Samsung 8T8R B41 radios are now 5G NR capable with a software update (40, 50, 60 MHz bandwidths - 40 MHz capability was approved under a subsequent application):

https://fccid.io/A3LSLS-BD10JQ/Test-Report/RF-Test-Report-4846240

Since T-Mobile apparently doesn't use Samsung equipment, I'm unsure of the purpose of this modification.

Maybe this is for Sprint towers that wont be decommissioned and will become TMUS towers. It would give T-Mobile NR right away in low priority areas (such as rural highways) without slowing down urban tower modernizations. 

But that's just my guess.

7 hours ago, the_intern said:

Not sure if this is related, but Southern Utah has started seeing 2500 gear on T-Mobile sites, so work is definitely underway to "modernize" the network. 

Sprint never moved this aggressively. T-Mobile is not playing around and will soon show why Sprint was wasting away the full potential of the EBS/BRS band. Sites in my area that just got 600 MHz not long ago are now getting Massive MIMO on B2/66 along with B41/n41. 

Having said that, their B41 definitely performs worse than Sprint's. Lots of timeouts, more latency, and more jitter. I guess this is supposed to be expected as "L41" isn't officially supported yet.

1 hour ago, RAvirani said:

I think ROAMAHOME got added to my line this morning because I have only been able to connect to T-Mobile all day. 

As a T-Mobile user, I've been able to connect to Sprint and use VoLTE. But that only lasts for a few minutes (at most) before I'm shoved back to T-Mobile.

It seems that if you have ROAMAHOME, then your line is now being like every T-Mobile line in that you will be shoved into the T-Mobile network as much as possible.

Not working out very well for Mexico yet.

2 hours ago, RAvirani said:

That's a very region-dependent claim. 

3 hours ago, greenbastard said:

Probably not many. T-Mobile has an overall better network. 

 

 I didn't make a region based claim. I made an overall claim. T-Mobile is just the better network. Both networks have bad areas across the country. Sprint just happens to have more of them.

4 hours ago, shaferz said:

 If that's the case, I predict a LOT of infuriated customers

Probably not many. T-Mobile has an overall better network. There are WAY more Sprint weak spots than there are T-Mobile weak spots.

Also, all T-Mobile iPhone users will soon be able to roam on Sprint towers. Most of the west coast and southern T-Mobile users can already use the Sprint network (so far most compatibility issues that have been found are exclusive to android devices)

3 hours ago, jthawks said:

So I got almost 300 mbps on band 66. My question is this 3ca or just a great connection? Can someone break this down for me?

Your images show up extremely pixelated, but it looks like you were aggregating Band 66 with a couple of Band 46 carriers. That would explain the speeds.

12 hours ago, Trip said:

You say this like it's a bad thing, but Shentel does it too and that's the best part of the Sprint network that I've experienced--and I'd argue that some of Sprint's problem has been that it doesn't do this.  Not prioritizing the deployment is how you end up with Band 41 on towers surrounded by corn fields and cow pastures in Fauquier County, but a Band 25 GMO serving multiple shopping centers in Alexandria. 

This is so true. The most frustrating thing about being a Sprint customer was seeing their lack of common sense when it came to deploying new technology. In Houston, they refused to upgrade old clearwire equipment for better performing 8t8r equipment and never bothered to do 4x4 MIMO on B25 (which was needed since they only owned the D, E, and G blocks here).

Yet every tower in rural Southern Louisiana seemed to have 4x4 mimo enabled and 8t8r equipment.

1 hour ago, dewbertdc said:

I'm wondering if CA was accelerated due to the wildfires.  Better to have two networks at their disposal during this time of need.

I doubt T-Mobile would want to run into potential network integration issues during this time. VoLTE works when roaming on Sprint, but it isn't working flawlessly. Sometimes I get no VoLTE and I have to switch the preferred network type to get it working.

This seems more like a region by region rollout.

My native T-Mobile line can now roam on Sprint using the 311-490 PLMN here in Houston. So far, it depends on the device you're using. VoLTE and SMS seem to work fine over all three Sprint bands on my unlocked Pixel using my T-Mobile SIM. Oddly enough, roaming isn't working on my tmobile OnePlus device.

43 minutes ago, iansltx said:

As of early yesterday morning, data on my phone is now routed through T-Mobile's backbone network rather than Sprint's. There are a few odd caveats to this:

1. Hotspot data still runs through Sprint, with what appears to be a worse-than-usual latency penalty.
2. I can simultaneously have on-phone data from T-Mobile and hotspot data from Sprint, with active data sessions on both.
3. Latency on-phone is better across the board, even on Sprint towers; I'm seeing as low as 29ms on B41, and a few ms lower at times on 25/26. On the T-Mobile network I'm seeing as low as 16ms on LTE; thinking that latency there is 5-15ms lower than it was when routing through Sprint.
4. T-Mobile's network seems to be having issues keeping up with this transition, particularly when using their towers. Mobile hotspot appears to be less affected, as does connectivity on Sprint towers, though for the latter I'm seeing speeds in the 70s on B41 when I was seeing 100+ Mbps before.
5. Depending on time of day, 5G appears to be more unusable than usual.
6. 80 miles west of here on Ting/Sprint, another S20 is still getting a CGNAT'd Sprint IP on-phone. Wouldn't be surprised if this transition only happened with ROAMAHOME lines, which MVNOs don't have.

TMo seems to be performing this switchover area by area; saw a post a week or so ago on Reddit where someone saw the same behavior...though in their case the phone was Sprint-primary rather than T-Mobile-primary as I recall.

If I had to guess, it'll take the better part of the month to iron out connectivity such that data speeds on the T-Mobile backbone are back up to what they were on Sprint, though latency is already better as mentioned above. During that time, T-Mobile will push other areas over to their backbone. Guessing this switch is necessary (but not sufficient) for getting access to T-Mobile's 5G core, and thus standalone 5G.

It will be interesting to see when mobile hotspot switches over to the T-Mobile backbone (at least for folks who don't have a static IP), as well as what happens to the SprintLink backbone in general. Maybe CenturyLink picks it up since they seem to like buying up Tier 1 network providers and running them into the gr...er...integrating them into a diverse portfolio of international connectivity? I was going to mention Dish, but have a feeling they wouldn't want the overhead of existing SprintLink customers.

T-Mobile's network is all sort of funked out at the moment in Houston. PCS has been widened for T-Mobile, which has pushed out the WCDMA carrier to Sprint's D block. That D block used to house 1x/EVDO.

I'm not sure where T-Mobile has moved CDMA to (and I can't check since I don't have a sprint line). They could fit one CDMA carrier alongside a WCDMA carrier in a 5x5 block. But I'm not sure about two (unless 3G EVDO has been shut down for good?).

Sprint's two B25 carriers is still online in the same place (E block and G Block). I'll try to see if I can sniff out the CDMA carriers this evening when I get home.

Seems like T-Mobile has expanded their Band 2 from 10x10 to 15x15 in the A block. The A block used to be 10x10 for LTE and 5x5 for WCDMA. This likely means that the WCDMA carrier was moved to Sprint's D block or E block. I don't have root to check at the moment. 

This merger is going faster than I thought.

4 hours ago, Trip said:

I've had my T-Mobile phone locked on Band 41 for several days now, in order to track down T-Mobile Band 41.  I've seen it show my home site in SCP, but always with No Service; presumably its final attempt to make a connection before giving up, and then the stale data lingers.

- Trip

 

My OP6t doesn't even scan for B41.

1 hour ago, Paynefanbro said:

I don't think Verizon wants any 600MHz at all. Rather they're concerned about a growing spectrum gap between T-Mobile and themselves which I think is a fair critique.

That's funny considering Verizon went all in on the 700 Mhz auction when they already owned Cellular licenses in most of the country. They gobbled up the upper C Block and several A and B blocks in 2008 (which are now owned by T-Mobile and At&t). Where was the concern then?