Trip

That's what I'm hoping for as well. I'm wary of T-Mobile's rural deployments, and I'm hoping they'll at least take what they're given and not try to cut tower costs... - Trip

If a customer is on Sprint because it works best for them (as I am), and shunting them to T-Mobile changes that (it would for me, in a vastly negative direction), it doesn't matter which network is "overall" better. I don't think you can translate your experience or even a statement about which is better overall into a general statement about whether or not there would be a lot of complaints. Even in areas where T-Mobile is better, Sprint is on different towers. People who have reception in their homes, workplaces, or other frequently visited areas today could lose that just because the exact tower location is different. Here in DC, I agree in general that T-Mobile has the denser network with more consistent coverage. Yet, without hesitation, I can take you to places where Sprint has better service than T-Mobile (just as I can take you to places where T-Mobile is better than Sprint). There's a community nearby that has somehow managed to fight off all the cell towers. Sprint has strand-mount gear installed, and T-Mobile has... nothing. Guess which network is better. There's a Trader Joe's sitting in a basement unit of a shopping center. Sprint is on a nearby building and works (barely), while T-Mobile is not and has no service. Large portions of the Shentel region that I regularly visit have reliable Sprint service and T-Mobile has very poor service. But I do agree that we should see the networks start to look transparent to each other at some point. There's no reason not to do so, and it would make this issue go away, at least on the large scale. As integration happens going forward, some people could lose out, but it would be tower-by-tower and not a wholesale change-over of the network all at once. - Trip

Ah, I see, I misread. I thought it was best 5G network. 😳 - Trip

Interesting. A network you barely ever connect to wins the prize for best network. I suppose if you never leave the urban core or, like, go inside buildings. - Trip

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. But to your other point, there's a ton of Sprint 8T8R and MMIMO gear they could recycle in the short term to cover the rest of the Band 41 spectrum; perhaps even just moving it from the Sprint rack to the T-Mobile rack. Or they could just leave it operating in the current tower position until the T-Mobile gear is upgraded with newer n41 gear and then remove the legacy Band 41 gear at that time. - Trip

I'm not sure how much of a rush T-Mobile is going to be in to turn off Band 41 LTE. Quite frankly, they need the capacity for the Sprint customers right now, and my understanding is that the existing NR equipment only does 100 MHz of LTE and/or NR, meaning any remaining spectrum would be wasted if Band 41 LTE were turned off before that NR equipment is, itself, replaced. I'm actually surprised they're running Band 41 LTE on T-Mobile in this area given that they could just run 100 MHz of NR and be done with it, but they must need the capacity on LTE for their own customers. If Band 41 LTE is gone at this time next year, my guess is that they either seriously subsidized cheaper NR phones and have much better penetration with those devices than I would expect otherwise, or they've decided to punish LTE customers with poor performance until they upgrade--or leave for AT&T or Verizon. - Trip

I've been seeing T-Mobile neighbor cells for weeks (months?) now. They come and go though; it clearly checks for them, but then stops checking and reverts to Sprint bands. Maybe to enable roaming if needed? I often see US Cellular sites in the neighbor cells when I'm in that region as well. - Trip

Not really a bug per se, but if the Action Bar color is set to red, for example, then the "Mobile Data: Inactive" is invisible when it's in that status because the text and the background are the same color. I'm not sure there's an obvious solution to that, or if one is even necessary, but I thought it was worth pointing out. That said, I've left it black on my devices so far. Having the text color in the Action Bar is sufficient for my purposes. I'm now able to easily glance at my devices and tell which one is which, for the first time in a while. (It was a lot easier when all my phones were different models, naturally.) - Trip

They do want to offer (or do offer, not sure if it launched yet) a fixed broadband service. - Trip

Bull Run? Sudley? Hm, I was on 66 near there on Monday and only saw one site there on Band 41 LTE, closer to Centreville. Maybe they don't have as much spectrum there and aren't running Band 41 LTE? I was near, but not in, the Lake Barcroft/Bailey's area less than half an hour ago and definitely saw some neighbor cells on Band 41. I had a very faint connection to Band 41, probably from somewhere over there.

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. I hope this is a sign they're planning to make both networks native to each other. Because there's really no reason not to, and I'm not sure why they would have gone through the trouble of changing a bunch of Sprint GCIs (most notably in Baltimore, from what I've observed first-hand, but I've seen it in other markets as well) to not conflict with T-Mobile ones if they weren't going to do that. - Trip

I love the new color options! I can now easily ID my phones by the color of the "SignalCheck Pro" text at the top. If I decide that's not obvious enough, I'll switch it to the Action Bar background color. - Trip

So I've now spotted T-Mobile Band 41 LTE on several sites in the Alexandria/Fairfax County, VA area, and I expect to see more area tomorrow. It appears to be on at least half a dozen that I've seen, though I'm not able to do a precise count right at the moment. Spectrum usage now appears to be something like this: 2518.4 MHz - small cell/strand mount 2538.2 MHz - T-Mobile LTE second carrier (I've not seen any small cell second carrier operations, so I assume that's been turned off) 2558.0 MHz - T-Mobile LTE first carrier 2640.4 MHz - Sprint LTE first carrier 2660.2 MHz - Sprint LTE second carrier 2680.0 MHz - Sprint LTE third carrier My assumption, then, is that some portion of the remainder, if not all of it, is in use for 5G-NR on those sites. - Trip

Mike, My big concern, the reason for the text color or looking at an "accent" color for the top isn't to tell what I'm connected to, but rather, which phone I'm looking at. My US Cellular phone might be roaming on AT&T or T-Mobile or Sprint, but when I glance at it, I want to be able to tell I'm looking at my US Cellular phone. Similarly for my Verizon phone which might be roaming on US Cellular, or my T-Mobile phone might be roaming on US Cellular or AT&T, etc. That's why I'm looking at text colors (which I'm not sure are the solution unless they're lighter than current options) or at some other kind of accent colors. Because SCP is always in the foreground on them, SCP is probably the best way to do that short of hoping a sticker will stay stuck to the front of the phones, which I doubt will work. I fully agree with your goal of keeping the app clean. I'm just trying to find a way to tell these things apart. - Trip

On Monday I'll be going back out of town and will have to test them out in the car. But I did test out T-Mobile in magenta today and found it too dark to read in the car; I switched it back to white. Also, it looks like the general text color and the text color in the header is different; I suspect the header color would be easier to read, but maybe not easy enough. See here: https://imgur.com/a/7L0l4uJ Separately, did you intend for there to be two accent lines, as seen here? https://imgur.com/a/Nnuvwrr If not, I must say I'd rather like to be able to manually set a color for that upper line. My whole reason for wanting to use different text colors is because I now have four Moto E5 Play phones, one each for Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and US Cellular, and they're nearly impossible to tell apart at a glance, and harder still if I'm in an area without service. Setting a matching text color would be one way to tell, but being able to set a color somewhere on SCP would also work. - Trip

So this is new, at least to me: https://imgur.com/a/Nnuvwrr Looks like, much like Sprint's MMIMO gear, these require separate GCIs for each sector. I have yet to see all three sectors of any. It looks like they're using the same PCIs as the AWS sectors, which is nice as it helps with IDing them. - Trip

Yeah, I'm thinking it's related to Android 10 somehow, because my other phones with Android 8 do not have this issue. (I'll double-check a bit later, but I feel like I would remember if I'd seen it before.) I've separately sent you a screencap of the error message I see in an e-mail; might be in the diagnostics as well, but just in case. EDIT: I just upgraded my T-Mobile E5 Play with Android 8 and did not experience the issue. I don't really have a problem with it personally, but I worry about how others who are less technical than I am might react to similar behavior. - Trip

Just got the upgrade and it broke my logs again. Sent diagnostics. I haven't cleared the data yet in case there's anything you'd like me to do. - Trip

This morning I upgraded my G8X on Android 10 to the previous beta build and found that it was acting like the log was empty, and also was not logging. Attempting to import the log database would crash the app. Going to the "Clear Database" option would give an error about tables already existing. I ultimately resolved the issue by clearing all app data. If it happens again on this latest update, I'll try to send diagnostics. Not sure if you'll get anything useful from them. But something that would be really helpful in this context is something I found recently in an app called Tower Collector, which I installed to replace Mozilla Stumbler. It has the ability to export and import the app's preferences to/from XML. Great for ensuring different phones are set the same way or allowing for preferences to quickly be restored if all the app data is cleared. Just a thought for a future release. - Trip

Looking at what's been posted here, I'm wondering whether it's the last two or last three digits that make up the sector. I don't think I've seen a value other than 0 in that third-to-last spot in anything that's been posted here. - Trip

So I decided to write them over the weekend, and I got a relatively generic reply, except for this one sentence: "Please note that antenna permits are only required to be pulled if the antenna is being placed on an actual building, antennas on poles do not require permits so there may not always be a permit needed." So that seems to explain that. Disappointing, but at least sensible. I might next write to Alexandria as I know I've seen the new antennas on a building without a permit I could find, but I haven't decided yet. - Trip

Mike, Closing the loop, the issue was apparently on my end somehow. I spent all day working on it after I realized that I had a bunch of duplicate rows (with the same _id value!). I cleaned all of those up, plus reinserted the rows that had been lost and removed the duplicates that had been created to replace the lost rows, and then realized that even when I sorted by _id, some of the rows were still out of order. An integrity check confirmed corruption in the database file. I dumped out all the data to a .sql file and then recreated the database file. Now it passes an integrity check, and I've pulled the new file into SCP. (If I do a sqldiff between the old file and the new one, it wants to "correct" the new one by deleting a bunch of rows which appear to be the rows that went missing previously.) I'm expecting that to resolve my issue. No news will be good news. - Trip

No, I haven't, and I'm not clear why that is. I was tempted to contact the Fairfax County permitting people to ask about it, but haven't felt like making the effort yet. - Trip

In/near Alexandria, VA. - Trip

I've now noticed three T-Mobile sites around me that I believe to now have 2.5 GHz antennas. I've seen plenty more that don't appear to have been upgraded yet, though, so I won't suggest my area is where they're aggressively upgrading. The first time I spotted one, I posted pictures: https://imgur.com/a/kD5lUkr - Trip