red_dog007

Is Dish still 100% MVNO or do customers now have the ability to use their towers?

VZW is supposed to have a C-Band coverage map. Seems like C-Band is all over the place. People on reddit testing from all over the nation. Kinda impressed really. Most tests seem to be like 400~700Mbps. Though as long as I get like 5Mbps when I need it, Im good, lol. I personally have been rocking 500MB to 4GB plans for the last 4 years.

What range of spectrum does aviation use that is specifically impacted? Why the heck is FAA making noise now? Did they make as much noise as possible before, during and just after the auction? If the FAA didn't show one ounce of concern before the auction, I would say the Feds auctioned this in bad faith as they did not do their due dillagence. They should have known before the auction and put * on licenses containing impacted airports. Any license area with an impacted airport the FCC should refund a portion of the bid for any delays and/or new requirements in the the license areas impacted by airports. Im all for safety, but the auction ended almost a year ago now and we knew the C-Band auction was coming for month before hand.

Fierce article mentions that it has less than 100k customers. Never even heard of Gen Mobile.

Auction 110, 3.45GHz to 3.55GHz, starts October 5th. Gonna be interesting to see how big carriers go after all the coin that was dropped on C-Band. Does this spectrum have a referred to name? Or will this just be referred to as C-Band once the auction is over instead of 3.45GHz?

Capacity isn't going to be an issue on C-Band. All they are doing is hurting capacity < 3.5GHz.

https://www.fiercewireless.com/regulatory/fcc-concludes-epic-800-mhz-rebanding-program

I haven't been able to find the research article, but it was from a vendor such as the likes of Nokia. They were testing real world scenario of 3.5GHz coverage and said that it performed very similar to 2.1GHz. There will be marketing from everyone, but I don't think that 3.5GHz is going to be this horrible band that 2.5GHz was originally made up to be by everyone just because some company said it wasn't good or didn't buy it. Technology has come a long way, we have many macro and micro sites now. Even if it has coverage shortfalls that doesn't matter because we have equipment to fix it. If VZW finds they need 3.5GHz in this one area that is a deadzone for speed, they can toss up a pole mount or wire mount antenna and fill it in. Shoot, all the companies have spent billions on mmWave, deploy on 5GHz, would like to deploy on 6GHz. The answer is you apply it to what you need, where it is needed, do you have enough, how do you make it enough? Do I need more spectrum, do I need to deploy more sites? You fix the issues with spectrum, hardware and engineering. You look at VZW now with the smallest spectrum portfolio (pre CBRS/C-Band) supporting the most users and they have not been left in the dust in terms of speeds but all these years have been able to still continually improve their speeds. I think TMobile can easily ignore C-band outside urban areas because their existing portfolio allows it, especially as bidding prices went up. They may have bid but hit a point of it not being worth it. They had loads of 600/PCS/AWS/2.5GHz that equal 200~300MHz. Before Sprint on rural builds they wouldn't even do full deployments, and sometimes only deploy on a single band. Shows that it isn't needed and they can still spend hundreds of millions doing full site builds in rural areas. They can still use 5GHz, in the future likely 6GHz. Plus CBRS is still available for unlicensed use.

They can infill with micros instead of dropping a macro. Upgrading existing macros will improve total coverage as well. VZW has been able to do extremely well with the macros, spectrum and customers that they have. So where ever they put their money they clearly show that it is a working strategy. I wouldn't be too concerned with the lack of additional macros.

End of 2023 is a long time from now. Will wait and see how coverage really is. In my area, TMobile still has a hell of a lot of work to do to be on par with AT&T/VZW. Hopefully the extra 20k macro sites are strictly for suburban/rural coverage. Here where I am, if they end up keeping the Sprint sites that don't have TMobile on them they will do very well. But hopefully sooner than later.

For Auction 107, TMobile's approach makes way more sense. Like why need 200MHz in all of Montana, North Dakota, etc? Just seems odd. Does this spectrum have build-out requirements?

They may get it cheap, but I'd doubt that means they would deploy a lot of it. Maybe more a protection thing so they don't have huge headaches with possible interference. In rural and smaller towns I go to, TMobile now is far from deploying their entire pre-Sprint spectrum portfolio. I go to places and all they do is deploy just a single band. If they go back with 5G they just add one more band (600). Or they have all but one band deployed. Unless they are going to do B41/n41 on every tower like Sprint was wanting to do, I wouldn't keep my hopes up for a ton of rural 2.5. You'd think though with fixed wireless services that doing full builds would make sense.

Auction 107: Hit $80.9B. Now going to enter the assignment phase where bidders can bid on specific spectrum blocks. Wonder how fast this will get online this year. TMobile's head start with 2.5GHz is gonna get challenged. I could see them taking the lead in wireless tests in 2021 but then the gap close in 2022. Auction 108: Three blocks. 49.5, 50.5 and 16.5MHz. I wonder how heavy TMobile will buy here. It'll sorta clean up their holdings and I could see down the road if they don't bid they have to invest more time keeping interference out of the current existing white-space. Likely at least secure entire counties they already own a partial license in. Everything about 2.5 is such a mess.

I just switched my parents from VZW to US Mobile on VZW. Their plans are $15/mo for 2.5GB, $30 for 10GB, $40 for unlimited and discounts with unlimited family. They opted for the two lines $70/mo unlimited. Good to know that Ting exists. Looks like some decent pricing for VZW network, includes hotspot which is nice. I think US Mobile it is an add-on feature.

Comcast and Charter do not overlap but do touch each other. So my Mom has Comcast but you go down her road 2 miles, Comcast ends and Charter begins. The area is old AT&T phone/dial-up service they shut down in like 2013 or so that they never upgraded to DSL. They deployed FTTH after the DirecTV merger so there are a few places where this new deployment overlaps Comcast and Charter but this is just areas where AT&T needs to go through to get to areas that were unserved.

$43/mo is the regular rate for 25Mbps. $63 regular rate gets you 100Mbps. We have Charter here too and it is a couple dollars more than Comcast for 100Mbps regular rate. I know TVision is a thing. Is TMobile doing bundling discounts though? Older folks also want their channels that they watch and these "skinny" packages tend to miss one or more major channels of interest so TVision likely isn't going to be a reasonable choice. Plus there is a ton of competition here. TVision is also very sports heavy. Live TV+ with 56 channels, 24 are sport channels. 4 Big 10 and 8 ESPN College Extra. Talk about bloat... I think if the carriers go into this not wanting to compete against cable to avoid deploying in those areas, that to many they will be doing a disservice. Landline ISPs have horrible maps. They don't even know sometimes that they have service in a particular area. Example, where my mom lives: She has access to 4 ISPs. 3 of them offer 1Gbps. Yet just on the other side of the ridge you are lucky to have 3Mbps DSL, many don't have any internet options but HughesNet. Yet we are all serviced by the same exact tower. I wonder what the exact criteria is to get a site like this flagged for fixed wireless services.

That $100+/mo is for those crazy high speeds. Even Comcast's 600Mbps regular rate is under $100 at $93/mo. At least here. The cheapest offering is 25Mbps for $43/mo. But then talking 60+, these people want their traditional cable TV. Comcast will have the power of bundling. Not sure if TMobile is there yet across their services.

When I switched to RedPocket GMSA in December from Sprint using a Verizon Palm Phone, VoLTE was working through February before it was disabled. That was a RP sim card straight into the Palm and activated in the Palm.

Would have been cool if they had merged with Appalachian Wireless. Maybe it is only a matter of time until they fall. I dislike seeing these smaller carriers kick the bucket. I have not looked into rural carriers profitability in their roaming contracts. But with Sprint now not being a major roaming partner for these regional carriers, I would not surprised to see more fall in the short term. With hindsight, maybe we could have expected this. They did not secure any 600 licenses while Appalachian Wireless secured a number of licenses. Has anyone looked into this? Regional carriers that were unable to secure a 600 license?

TMobile and Verizon will be all VoLTE here soon. I don't see why AT&T couldn't. Though they have a very tee tiny list of VoLTE capable devices. Some kind of technical issue because of some piece of hardware/software they opted for years ago? They don't want to put the extra effort into it? Use this as an opportunity to sell phones? They already have a decent number of markets that lack 850. It sucks going from a very usable LTE 700 to not being able to place a fall call due to the lack of 850. I have even noticed that AT&T 700 LTE coverage is better than their 850 HSPA coverage in my area. VoLTE works on on my phone both TMobile and VZW, why the heck not AT&T!

Any of those phones do VoLTE on AT&T? Where I go often, AT&T doesn't own CLR so HSPA coverage is very poor. I have a V30 US998 that works just fine on VZ VoLTE but AT&T does not. Very annoying to have a good B12 signal only for it to drop to no service when trying to place a phone call. 😕

When we talk prepaid here, this includes Verizon Prepaid + their owned MVNOs such as Visible and Yahoo Mobile? So with the Tracfone purchase those users would be considered prepaid?

Man, they should do like at least like a $20 credit on your account if you bring it into a store. Don't think it is responsible of them to make a million paper weights that will significantly end up in the trash. Can we expect another 20MHz to get added to 5G!?

Still get higher prices to whomever might buys DirecTV. Might either be a foreign company or a sat company who doesn't care about the TV service. What spectrum does DirecTV use/own? FCC could put in the agreement for no price increases for so many years.

This is something Dish should have gotten. That would have put them at 30M subs where they could offset data usage with their own coverage. Don't have coverage, no problem, just roam on one of the big three. I think they missed a huge opportunity here to help subsidized their network buildout. Is there a list or data anywhere on like the top 10 MVNO groups by subscriber count? edit: not including prepaid or carrier owned MVNOs (Visible, Cricket, Metro, etc). What would be funny is if VZ actually pushes those 13M users off their network. VZ is doing fantastic with their limited resources, but to move 13M off your network onto your competitors, all while you still profit off these users and make your network even better for your post paid subscribers, brilliant!