gusherb

I setup my brothers iP6S on GoPhone for him today and much to my surprise I found band 30 while sitting on my front porch. I couldn't believe it because the tower it came from is over 3 miles away and through lots of forest. Apparently AT&T out does Sprint in distance on every band, because I never saw band 41 reach further then a mile, maybe 1.5 miles at best. I had assumed B30 would be limited to about a mile based on my experiences with B41.

This is interesting, especially because I was thinking about just yesterday how I wouldn't be surprised if there was a big change at SoftBank or even somehow a surprise sale of Sprint and then today this news is released. And I've not been paying attention to them lately so even more surprised I had that feeling. I am curious what this means though.

Yeah exactly why I won't go to a store!

I don't see why that would be necessary in person. The others don't have a problem doing BYOD online. My concern is that as soon as I stepped into a store they would be completely clueless about BYOD, tell me that sprint doesn't do that and then try to sell me a brand new phone. I have zero faith in their retail stores after what I've encountered in them.

It's about time they get with the times (sort of)! Though I keep reading language on that page about having it "installed" at a sprint store ie activate there. If that's the only way they'll have one activate a BYOD device is by going to the store then there's no way I'll consider this. I also don't understand why they can't make things more DIY friendly. I despise having to interact with customer service for such simple things. And it would also be nice if you could activate this on prepaid!

I don't understand how Verizon keeps getting the very top rating here. They're not as good as Rootmetrics makes them out to be. The indoor coverage isn't that great in the city, T-Mobile actually does slightly better in that regard... AT&T still has the best indoor coverage but the network is very saturated so speeds aren't blazing fast but it does always work.

I'm pretty sure the PCS LTE that is lighting up in Chicago is 5x5. When they eventually move that to 10x10 in the next year or so, and get that B12 going, they'll be running 60 MHz of LTE, which is where VZW is at in that market today.

I understand the concept of what they're doing but to me it seems like a vicious circle. If you don't extend the reach of every LTE band as far as possible people will be falling back to 3G, and if people keep falling back to 3G then the CDMA network is gonna continue to see higher traffic, then spectrum won't be able to be reallocated to the congested LTE. Seems they need to just rip the band aid off already and fully commit to making sure LTE is in every corner of its footprint, slow or not.

It's the experience, not the age. Yes age does have a pretty big influence on experience but automatically assuming age and experience go 100% hand in hand is a little narrow sighted. In my years I have learned there are quite a few things that really just have to be experienced to know, and that those experiences come with age. This subject about buying into hype is not one of them though, anyone can learn and/or experience it from a pretty young age and wise up pretty fast. Just because science says the brain fully matures at 25 doesn't mean you didn't get any experience in all those years prior. ALOT can be experienced before the age of 25. As for this 5G talk, as far as I'm concerned, any reality of it is way too far off for me to even bother thinking about. Anything now is just a wild idealistic pipe dream. 3-7 years from now and we'll start to see a realistic view of it as it begins to develop into something practical. One things for certain, it's gonna have to be practical and cost effective or it will never fly.

Whenever I see TMUS I hear it as "T-Moose" in my head...

When I had Verizon prepaid for a short while in June of last year, I made a call while in the car on the expressway and it sounded like they were talking through a kazoo. Someone on HoFo complained about that very thing happening and I didn't believe them, thinking it was just the usual muffled crap. Boy was I proven wrong, a kazoo couldn't have been a more accurate comparison. That's my worst voice experience on VZW. At home 1x was ok, not the usual muffled crap. But overall the call quality proved to be a complete deal breaker so I didn't stay on prepaid then. In my experiences AT&T has done an extremely good job building out in ex Alltel territories. They've been giving VZW a serious run for its money since March 2011 in southwest Colorado. Funny story; my sister moved to Durango, CO in February 2011 and was roaming on Commnet, unknowingly since the alpha tag on her iP4 just showed "AT&T E". Well a month and 1,200 minutes later she got a call from them telling her they were gonna terminate her service for excessive roaming. Took her by surprise and she didn't know what to do. So me and my mother drove out there at the end of March and we discover that there was 3G, I said to my sister "wow I can't believe there's 3G all over this area" and then she told me that story followed by her saying "yeah it just showed up on my phone this morning". So I showed up in Southwest CO the very day AT&T lit up its brand new network.

Oh good, you beat me to it so I didn't have to explain this for a second time today. The G.729 thing kinda soured my Verizon calling experience just a little because it introduced scratchiness and a reduction in overall call volume that annoyed me. It also didn't help that the majority of people I talk to are on AT&T so I was used to AMR-WB 12.6 on top of that from being on AT&T myself. My friend just switched from T-Mobile to VZW and it sounds like ASS. We can't use anything wifi based either because his router has poor range and he absolutely refuses to upgrade it, so I either get choppiness or muffledness depending if he's on wifi calling or 1x. Sprint sound quality was always pretty good for me except that I always had robogarble in just about every call. I got sick of that and was happy to be on AT&T UMTS for calls even despite using AMR 5.9 most of the time. And now I use VoLTE of course. Its a shame testing doesn't include sound quality, but at the same time I think the majority doesn't care/doesn't know any better.

In all my observation and first hand experience, It seems Sprint's engineers have approached overall signal optimization as an after thought. Or at least they could've approached it better straight from the beginning. The thing is, optimization is everything when it comes to network performance and customer experience. Optimization is one of the most important aspects to any system of any sort. Verizon has won when it comes to signal optimization hands down IMO, and T-Mobile is right up there with them. AT&T does a good job optimizing it's signal but not as good as those two.

They can also optimize their low band for seamless coverage, crippling congestion be damned. (Just be extremely aggressive about keeping devices off of it unless actually needed). This is how Verizon works with their B13. If they're smart, this is exactly what they will do.

AT&T has made the jump to "wideband" PCS LTE in the Chicago area as of sometime very early this morning. Now running at 15 MHz FDD. I'm using an iPhone 6 which is CAT4 and can't aggregate more than 20 MHz DL so that has to be just B2:

Anyone got any idea what's going on here? Sprint and T-Mobile are the only two I can make out.

30 MHz is just not enough. Even with decent tower density about the same as AT&T in the city. AT&T is running anywhere from 40-80 MHz on towers depending on where, closer to downtown I think most have 60-80 MHz. Big difference from T-Mobile. They would need to go way denser to survive on what they have deployed now.

Make it a surprise drop in on Sprint stores tour, perhaps not even as CEO, and watch store operation, maybe even pretend to be a customer. And do it quietly without a big PR spin, so something can actually be learned.

Having watched the ad now I can see where she's coming from. She's a perfect example of how long it takes the general population to catch onto when a corporation has seriously improved and to forget their past. I think the word "ghetto" was definitely used in the wrong context and what she meant to say was "they are so bad how could anyone use them?!" Or some other word that would appropriately describe that feeling. And that was definitely true up until recently - they truly had no modern service or none at all outside of large metro areas, and that was as late as late 2014 - early 2015. I think the whole thing was blown a bit out of proportion and Sprint most definitely shouldn't have published that. I also think this was a good example of how quick people are to jump down ones throat for accidentally using the wrong word in certain contexts and also jump down Sprints throat over every minute error they make. It's often a good idea to take a step back and think before reacting to anything. Words aren't the be all end all to communication and many other factors are at play before deciding whether something someone said was an attack, an error in words used, or just plain ignorance.

I don't get why Sprint is still spinning its wheels when it comes to customer interface nearly 2 years after Marcelo taking over, and with all this supposed cleaning house. He must either not know what he's doing or he didn't clean the right people out or didn't do it extensively enough. Hell, maybe they are oblivious and think everything is just fine. One thing they really haven't improved on that kinda turns me off is customer self service. And also BYOD which is related to self service, because every other carrier at least allows self service BYOD prepaid account setup online. Verizon has gone so far as to now allow not only prepaid but post paid BYOD account sign ups online and even giving the option to use your own VZW SIM card (or order one for free) so as to be able to have working service right away with no wait. AT&T and T-Mobile allow BYOD postpaid sign ups but just require sending a SIM card, but still close enough. They also still continue to have a bottom of the barrel bunch of corporate and authorized retailers in my area (pretty much the SNL skit). Not sure how the SprintShacks are doing though, quite frankly I never cared for that move either and is another story... Don't get me wrong, I really wanna like Sprint but they aren't really where they should be yet and I'm growing concerned if they'll ever be able to get to where they should be. They have fierce competition and need to move quicker, or I see their demise as we know them coming. Just not as soon as the haters predict (Sears has been on a slide to the bottom for 40 years for example) I left them a year ago hoping they would've kicked it in the ass and made drastic changes for the better by now and I would want to come back, but looks like that ain't happening.

Oh ok. I figured it was but wasn't sure. Our carrier order is somewhat jumbled depending on the county. Lake County, IN didn't own any B4 licenses until the Leap buyout and they needed more spectrum so they deployed B2. So here it's 17, 2, 4, and now the first 30 sighting has popped up on a 17/2 site, so skipping B4 in some spots. In Cook county, or anywhere they owned band 4 all along, its 17, 4, 2 and 30. B2 never got deployed on some sites though, just like B4 here.

Oh! You're jakeuten! I knew you sounded very familiar to me. I see you're using a 5S but do you know if CA is live over there? Maybe it has something to do with that, I noticed non CA devices being shuffled around differently than newer ones w CA. Or perhaps maybe band 4 isn't live on every site while B2 is? That is the case in my area, so besides B2 being priority I still spend more time on it because B4 isn't everywhere yet. There are parts of Chicago without band 2 yet as well, so I used to think B4 was priority until I figured that out and turns out they are balanced evenly where both are live (they're both 10 MHz in Cook county, IL)

What's the bandwidth of B4 and 17 in your area? Around here AT&T prioritizes wider channels so I get put on band 2 10MHz more than band 4 5MHz. Back when B17 was 10 MHz and only B2 5Mhz existed I was on B17 most often.

You definitely need the other end to be HD capable for HD voice but that doesn't mean the network can't decide to bump you up to AMR 12.6 regardless of who you're calling. All that HD symbol means is that you're on the codec for HD. As for your poor experience with VQ perhaps it's possible you live in a spot where it is bad, or your preferences just vary from many others. For surely Sprint and T-Mo sound different, CDMA generally does sound brighter and it is louder than UMTS/VoLTE. If I had to go to a retail location and get Sprint service I would try one of their national retail accounts, like Best Buy or Target. My moms best friend handles those accounts in the south and west suburbs. Personally I would just do it online or over the phone.