gusherb

For as long as I was on the AT&T HSPA network (February 2010 - 9-21-12) there was always some kind of inconsistency almost anywhere I went around my area. From dropped calls, to inconsistent 3G speeds to poor signal. They could have had a really good HSPA network around here if they actually spent more then the bare minimum on building it out, engineering etc. I didn't get to see what good 2G GSM was like until last year when I tried T-Mobile for the first time, that was quite a bit nicer then what I had been used to for several years that's for sure. I've yet to try their FauxG network. Back to AT&T, they do seem to have hit the nail on the head in the Alltel area's they took over, at least southwest Colorado, I never had a better network experience on them then out there on their new HSPA network. They even put Verizon to shame over there.

HSPA for me on AT&T was always very easily slowed down by signal degradation. I did notice how much more resistant EVDO is to speed degradation as the signal worsens. it was not uncommon to see 5-6 mbps at night and 1 mbps in the daytime, from the same tower in the same location. Your T-Mobile experience sounds like the typical HSPA experience on a not perfectly managed network (like AT&T), which is how it sounds like TMO is in your area. I wouldn't be surprised if the voice network wasn't in the absolute best shape in that area either, around here TMO is Sprints only rival VQ wise (except maybe USCC) Have you compared the voice quality between 2G and UMTS yet? and also does your phone handoff from 3G to 2G when you leave a 3G area or does it just drop the call?

What the Deathstar DOESN'T tell you is that 3G errr I mean "4G" speeds are throttled during calls! (at least they were on iPhone 4) down to 300 kbps. It was practically useless anyway... Much happier with my Sprint GS3 and full speed surfing on LTE during calls and even full speed SVDO.

There is alot of LTE coverage around the Chicagoland area but they have a ways to go before having the coverage that the map shows. I don't know why they couldn't have shown a map that shows the current coverage, I guess they jumped the gun and showed future coverage since they are pretty much lighting new sites up every week. Every week I find a place where I have coverage now that I didn't the other day, week before, etc. At this point the coverage in reality is more like swiss cheese in most places. The holes are filling in rapidly. I happen to be lucky, and live in Northwest Indiana, which is practically done, LTE live on every site nearby, just a few sites left here...

We used to have 4 lines and DSL at my mothers business on AT&T, 2 lines and DSL at home, and 3 wireless lines with them. Those 4 lines and DSL at the business were a reliability nightmare from the getgo in 2003, you pretty much NEEDED 4 lines just to guarantee that you would always have one working line without static and buzzing... At home service was always fantastic, POTS never died except one day in 2004 when a digger cut the 300 pair trunk running to the neighborhood when they were retrofitting DSL and running a cable from the new DSLAM across the railroad tracks to our crossbox. the 200 dollars a month for 4 noisy lines, and DSL that maxed out at 2.0 Mbps and dropped often was my reason for pushing her to switch to Comcrap, now she has 3 VOIP lines and 17/3 internet for 165. After the contract ends I'm porting those lines to another VOIP provider as their standard rate is a rip. At home I ported the second line to Ooma, switched the DSL over to Uverse and kept the main line on POTS. As for the cell service I was on them for 5 years she was on them for 13 years, service was great til beginning of this year then took a huge dump all over, and here I am now on Sprint... It's been a long process but I've been removing myself and my parents from AT&T, slowly but surely.

There is supposed to be only a small percentage of corporate stores with repeaters or LTE repeaters I read in a thread around here. The corporate store by me had an LTE repeater but they hadn't turned it on yet, I could tell, the phones had LTE coming and going constantly.

Galaxy S3.

I didn't catch the SID. Currently at home though my SID is 4384. Not sure why if SMR is a higher priority that I'm not connecting, even though it's been proven a few times that SMR 800 is indeed live... even in places that show SMR as being live on the site map here my phones not connecting. (still on PRL 25009)

Perhaps it was live on one of the nearby sites that had LTE live too. the site right next to that mall hasn't been upgraded to LTE yet for whatever reason, though sites close by are.

SMR was not removed from the latest update.

I'm consistently getting 2.0-2.6 mbps regularly on towers that have LTE live here in the suburbs. In Chicago it's another story, LTE may be live but 3G is still barely usable to not usable. That's because of congestion on the little spectrum they have, they have the backhaul, LTE is zipping while 3G is limping.

Today in the local indoor mall where Sprint signal was horrid (no DAS for all 4 of the major carriers in this place) I found my phone searching for a usable channel on EVDO, and then it was also searching channels on 1X, eventually it landed on band class 10, channel 476, Sprints CDMA 800. Only thing is it didn't have any luck getting a better signal on that. What I'm getting at is the fact that for me my GS3 is only hunting for 800 SMR when 1900 is too weak. Some have said that it will park itself on 800, and other info states that it won't connect until 1900 signal is almost completely dead. For me it was the latter, although 800 SMR is not really fully setup and live around that mall so I was still unsuccessful in using it this time.

When I was testing the different codecs I turned off EVRC-B and used just EVRC and it sounded like crap compared to EVRC-B. Considering Verizon and sprint are using EVRC-B and Verizon still doesn't sound as good makes me think they lock it to a lower bitrate then Sprint.

I checked during that call it was band class 1. My phone hasn't connected to CDMA 800 in weeks.

I just made a call and checked mine and get service option 68. Not sure what that means but it's not #3 like you say.

Yeah I'm aware that Edge is a data standard and has nothing to do with voice. Was using it as reference to the 2G GSM standard. My GS3 is configured for EVRC-B. Some observations is that my cousin with a GS3 on Verizon talking to her is still quite hard as it's muffled and garbles alot. My dad has a Tracfone LG235C that operates on Verizon and it's clear and sounds very good with no garbling at all. I wonder if the LG235C is using a different codec or is just that much better as a phone then a GS3. My GS3 performs very well on Sprint with the stock voice codec configurations. I've tried 13k or QCELP13 and it did not perform nearly as well on that phone as the stock setting - EVRC-B. When doing some research I've found various forum posts from places up to 10 years ago describing Verizon sound quality to sound like just as it does now. They seem to have never allowed the highest rate on any codec they've used. and I thought Sprint was using EVRC-B just like VZW is now.

As usual it's very dependent upon the handset. My experience is with just a cheap Tracfone LG420G that operates on T-Mobile. It used to operate on AT&T GSM before until I had to have them send me a new SIM card which turned out to be a TMO one. Anyway when I made my first call on it the quality blew me away (just like Sprint's quality did the first time I made a call on their network) T-Mobile Edge to me compares well to Sprint and the main differences are it's very natural sounding and lacks the bright metallic sound that is the characteristic of CDMA. They were both loud and insanely clear without having to crank the handset volume, CDMA of course has the signal advantage since it retains a clear call all the way til you practically are losing signal, though I found that I was able to hold a clear call on that LG420G with just one bar on TMO Edge. What it comes down to is picking which you prefer. They both sound very very good. I prefer the sound of POTS and VOIP using the G.711 codec and TMO AMR-FR Edge resembles that most. But in the end VQ is not a deciding factor between those two, I love them both.

In this area T-Mobile has impressive coverage, and phenomenal voice quality (better then Sprint) It goes like this here: Coverage wise T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, AT&T. VQ wise T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, AT&T. Sprint 3G is alot better around Chicago then it was a month ago. AT&T is by far the one with the big coverage problems here in the suburbs, why? seems like they seriously mismanage the network. They have far more then enough towers to surpass all other carriers in coverage with their 850 spectrum and 700 for LTE, but in reality it's the total opposite. But quite interestingly they had great coverage here for years! then all the sudden around the beginning of this year it tanked, all over the Chicago suburbs.

On top of bad VQ and disappointing "4G" speeds is the lack of a consistent, strong signal with twice as many towers as Verizon who has better coverage with fewer towers across the suburbs. AT&T has by far the worst coverage in the Chicago suburbs out of the big 4.

This sounds awesome. Makes me even more interested in home phone connect should I ever need such a thing. Wonder how it performs over crappy evdo speeds, I also wonder if it does 1x fall back (it must). I almost want one just to play with! But I'm not giving up our trusty AT&T POTS line until they shut the network down or we move hahaha.

The standard codec used in most VOIP applications is G.711 and runs at 64 kbps. Some other codecs used in VOIP can use up to 128 kbps I believe, which would be more like HD voice.

How do you know that the Home Phone Connect 2 uses VOIP? is that fact or an assumption? I looked around trying to see if I could find any info about that and couldn't come up with anything, just says it uses 3G which to me is rather vague. It would probably be really cool if it does! I'd expect much higher VQ then 1X in that case.

You try different servers? I've had that happen because of bad routing sometimes. One time the speedtest app was acting up, causing slow downloads, then it crashed, I rebooted the phone and it was fine afterwards.

She's on her third iPhone now and it's still doing the same 3G thing. Fortunately in the mean time LTE coverage is pretty good here because that is unaffected by the issue. Called Sprint and they finally confirmed that it is a known issue and opened up a trouble ticket. Now whether that gets things resolved or not who knows, but at least they know of the problem and aren't denying it.

Just outside of Chicago. I'm on 25009.