gusherb
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Everything posted by gusherb
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Were you using different phones when you compared? It's quite possible that made all the difference you noticed. I've always used iPhones with a few androids here and there, they all sounded different for sure. But I've tested all 4 networks on an iPhone 6 so it can't really get much more subjective than that, and definitely find T-Mobile the winner, Sprint and AT&T relatively close or a tie, and VZW last. A different phone may net a different result though.
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I think he just doesn't like the sound of the codec used. Nothing to do with the network quality itself AFAIK. I've always found their VQ to be stellar no matter which tech it is, and I've been testing them in the area since 2011. Verizon VoLTE is another story, I mentioned that above. The only time it sounded great/same as AT&T/T-Mo was when calling another VZW VoLTE capable phone. I think over on Michigan avenue T-Mobile does have a cell every block, hard to confirm but my signal was consistently strong from block to block. I also noticed the congestion being better or worse from block to block, some spots still are fast.
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I used T-Mobile on Michigan avenue just back in February. When I could get a call out voice quality was not an issue at all. It sounded great every time. VoLTE failed a few times though. As for their macro density, they already seem to be about equal with AT&T which is quite good. AT&T just has small cells downtown, and more spectrum throughout. So on a macro level I think T-Mo is pretty good. Despite that, if spectrum is gonna continue to be an issue they will need to go even denser no question. I wanna say them and AT&T have cells every 4-6 blocks or so, outside of downtown.
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I agree. I don't understand how T-Mobile could be considered subpar in VQ. T-Mobile has by far had the best VQ, what I love is that VoLTE and UMTS sounds exactly the same on their network, and that both technologies support HD voice. Sprint was close when it was at its best but usually it had some random garble in most calls. AT&T UMTS for me was about the same as sprint but without the robogarble. Their VoLTE is on par with T-Mobile's. I tried Verizon recently and think I finally figured out what makes them sound so awful. They apparently don't use G.711 in their network when interfacing with the PSTN. I could never quite place my finger on that when I used their CDMA but when I finally tried their VoLTE I was shocked to hear almost the same characteristics as their CDMA voice, this scratchy hollow sound. That sound I've heard before when tinkering with VoIP - G.729. Terrible sounding codec.
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Oh. I hardly check over there. Cool to see it announced and already live at the same time. Usually you hear an announcement followed by "coming soon".
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Forum user One Direction has already reported spotting EVS in the T-Mobile LTE speedtest thread over on HoFo.
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That is so not the case in my area. In most cases if I'm indoors somewhere and fall off LTE, H+ is sluggish as hell. There's like two places I can think of where H+ actually does work better and that's it. Not to mention one of the 850 channels keeps jamming making nothing work, not even calls. Let me put it this way, AT&T H+ works so poorly in my county that Verizon EVDO running on PCS makes it look bad. Chicago OTOH is the complete opposite, it works almost everywhere.
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Is WCDMA really prone to co-channel interference? The past few months something has been going on in about a 3-4 mile radius around my house that makes one of the two 850 channels completely useless on one of the towers frequently, and on two others sometimes. Not even a call can go through. Very sporadic like someone is running a cell jammer or perhaps co-channel interference. Any thoughts?
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Mandatory autopay? I call BS. Maybe some promo that requires enrollment in autopay or something. -
When Sprint starts rolling out VoLTE they're gonna have no choice but to turn that B26 up and make it cover as much as possible. Otherwise it'll be dropped call central. AT&T did the same when it rolled VoLTE out in my area. Makes for an easily congested B17, but that still works better than their HSPA 95% of the time.
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In my own experience my iPhone and nexus 5 would always drop back to 3G around -112 and -115 at best. It's of no fault to the devices it's definitely how they have things setup. It was infuriating to me because LTE would work until it dropped and 3G would be terribly slow or useless. On AT&T if SNR is really bad (which it's pretty saturated so it usually is) I'll drop around -118 or so. On a good day it may hold to -123 or so. I've been to quite a few of their 5x5 B17 areas, two counties over is one in fact, and 5 MHz B17 performs pretty well and hangs on pretty tight just like in 10 MHz areas. Another example of an AT&T 5x5 market is San Angelo, TX where i spent a few days last summer. I stayed put on B17 around -114 dbm indoors consistently. Even out in fringe areas 8 or so miles from a tower I had no issue with it. Whatever sprint is doing with B26 in my market I don't agree with it and have found it infuriating from the beginning. I think they could manage it better, and I know they have at least in the KC metro.
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Funny it was all crickets when I tweeted this last month with the exception of T-Force responding. Must be no T-Mo fanboys in the Chicago area. This was taken out on the street.
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Yikes. That's like all of downtown Chicago. It's a horror at rush hour. People are gonna start catching on if they don't do something soon.
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Did I miss something? What made you switch back? I've toyed with the idea myself lately but don't think they've fixed anything that I had a problem with yet.
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It does get tiring. I've been doing some lately just out of curiosity and it's takes some time to examine everything. As far as that map goes, VZW and T-Mo shared the A and F blocks but they swapped portions so VZW owns the whole A block, and T-Mo, the entire F block. VZW also owns the entire B block, and T-Mo the E block. In Lake, and Porter county, IN, T-Mo owns the D block on top of E and F. That leaves AT&T with the smallest slice of the AWS-1 pie in the Chicago market (especially in Lake and Porter counties). That map was last updated March 2013 - 3 years ago.
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That doesn't look right at all. They have a contiguous 30 MHz of AWS and 30 MHz of PCS. Right now all AWS is in use for LTE, all PCS is in use for GSM and DC-HSPA.
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Where you are its 10x10 B2, 4, and 17. And band 2 is free to be widened to 15x15. Not sure when but it'll happen at some point, could be tomorrow or 6 months from now.
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IME I've found tmobiles up close and zoomed in coverage maps to seem fairly accurate. I can at least confirm that it pretty accurately depicts coverage in my county, maybe a little bit more conservative than it actually is. I followed along some of my usual travel routes out west and nice to see everything is LTE but seems like it would be a bit patchy in a lot of places. Looks like Colorado has B12 deployed across the whole state, and the B12 and non B12 map shows a pretty big difference. The zoomed out coverage map just looks like someone went on a coloring spree. Anything and everything including roaming shows up as magenta. If I moved to T-Mobile permanently I'm definitely gonna need to upgrade to a B12 phone if I want good service while traveling. I'm one month shy of the 1 year mark of moving to AT&T. A year ago I said I'd consider Sprint again after a year. So far in looking at sprint they haven't really done anything in the parts of Lake County, IN that I frequent. I did find a new USCC conversion site in one place I complained about before and that was it. Aside from that, no new spottings of any sites going up. i am seeing a third panel on a couple of sites and that's about it. I'm not convinced that there has been enough improvement for me to come back yet. Maybe when they get VoLTE going, cuz then they'll have to optimize LTE to fill in every gap to ensure no dropped calls.
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The only band that's missing from the A1723 that AT&T is using is B29. And does anyone know if it's just no 2xB41 CA or no CA at all?
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And by Verizon! Sprint should feel honored!
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This is my second biggest issue with considering T-Mobile as a permanent carrier right behind their overloaded network in much of the Chicago area. I just can't support a company that is actively shitting all over Net Neutrality if I can help myself. I would much rather they scrapped everything including Music Freedom and just increase the data buckets, though that would kinda toss out all their smoke and mirrors marketing and they would lose their "differentiation" from everyone else. I guess that would make them look more like Sprint if they did such a thing.I'm sure they could put some "cool" spin on it though, like "Simply Data" or something stupid like that.
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The one ironic thing in this market is that the two counties where T-Mobile never once had a congestion issue and has had an exceptionally dense network for years, they own an extra band 4 license courtesy of the AT&T buyout failure. Which wasn't contiguous with their current holdings until just this fall when AT&T so graciously swapped licenses with them in those two counties in order to make it a contiguous 20x20 block of band 4. AT&T had nothing to gain by that as they only own one 10 MHz block of band 4 in Lake and Porter counties. I feel that a merger with Sprint will be the long term "solution" to this. Meanwhile they just hold out and efficiently muster up what they can with what little they have or can acquire without too much trouble, to prevent an undoing of all their marketing effort over the last 3 years. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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T-Mobile is way oversold in pretty much the whole Chicago area where they're running 30Mhz B4 LTE. Compare that to Verizon whose running 60 MHz across the whole area, AT&T which is running anywhere between 40-80 MHz depending on the tower and area (and that will bump up to 50-90 MHz at some point), and Sprint is also operating 50-80 MHz of LTE. So that puts T-Mobile at pretty much half the deployed LTE spectrum as everyone else. The only spectrum they can refarm in the short term is another 20 MHz from their PCS holdings if they shut down GSM, and take out one of the two HSPA channels.
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So out of curiosity, the other day I dug out my iPhone 3G (my first iPhone) and surprisingly it fired right up so I stuck my SIM card in and decided to see what was happening with AT&T's GSM service in my area since WCDMA has been moved to the PCS F block where I suspected GSM1900 used to reside. I found about 11 850 GSM channels all wedged in the guard bands and 2 of those were in the old AMPS control channel, just as suspected. And also as suspected I found no GSM1900. Today I'm in the city and borrowed a friends T-Mobile Note 3 on AT&T and used band selection to see if GSM1900 is gone in the city as well...and sure enough, it is. Only was able to pick up some weak GSM850 from a distant cell site.
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DFW is an A&B area for AT&T and they have band 5 LTE there.
