gusherb

back in the day Chicagoans used to in-market roam on US Cellular, with Verizon as a secondary choice. So roaming on Verizon here was rare up until the USCC shut down, which by then Sprint had improved it's network to a point where we rarely had to in-market roam anyway. Before NV 1.0 was complete USCC may as well have been an extension of Sprint's network with how frequent Sprint phones roamed on them, all you really had to do was walk indoors and voila you'd be on USCC. I used to assume Sprint roamed on VZW anywhere that no other carrier was available until I traveled through a part of southern CO where the only roaming partner in the PRL was Commnet, and Commnet itself had next to no service. I was screwed with no service for many many miles on that trip.

So I ported to T-Mobile the other day out of curiosity and frustration at AT&T for having a tower issue by my house and giving me a BS answer about the state of it. So far I'm extremely pleased with their service in Lake County, IN where we have 20x20 AWS (a nice little exclusive to our county everyone else in the area gets 15 mhz FDD). Never a slow spot, haven't had any real dead spots yet, except in Target it kept losing service in my pocket but regained every time I pulled it out. The real test was today when I actually went into downtown Chicago for the first time in almost a year, someone with an at&t phone was with me the entire time so I did side by side tests. Bottom line is at&t was alot better on the mag mile and later on after rush hour driving south on Clark st at&t blew the doors off T-Mo. Despite T-Mobile being alot slower it was still very usable and I never lost service indoors either, so it was still a pleasant experience. It never did drop below 5 mbps downtown and usually hovered around 10-15 mbps with peaks of 30mbps. AT&T stayed around 25 mbps with peaks of 68mbps. So to my own surprise T-Mobile is still rather viable in this area.

I know for a fact Simple Choice is 200 MB's across the board. They got a lot of heat for it being what it was before, as low as 10 MB's on the old $50 1 gig plan. As for Simply Prepaid it doesn't clearly state the alottment.

Actually, it's just the $30 5 gig plan that has no data roaming. I think, but I'm not certain, that the Simply prepaid plans come with data roaming. I know for sure that Simple Choice Prepaid comes with 200 MB's of domestic roaming data just as the postpaid SC plans do. Nothing has changed recently except the alottment for Simple Choice. Update: The fine print on their site does say all plans $40 and up include domestic data roaming.

What do you mean no roaming for T-Mobile prepaid? All of the prepaid plans include domestic roaming, and most include domestic data roaming.

Ditto that.

I've had it where it just doesn't ring, and then someone answers. on AT&T VoLTE my phone will usually start ringing before ringback tone is heard on the callers end. Sometimes when someone I call who has a line that does that will answer so quickly that I freak when I hit call, hear silence and then "hello?".

I did just that, what a PITA it was too, forget mail order being more convenient when trying to find a phone you like or is not defective, still gotta drive to drop the damn thing off to ship it back. I would prefer to purchase my phones in person if I can help it. It's bad enough most stuff is already mail order only, be worse if everything was.

This thread needs to steer back to a more productive course...

Never mind... :deleted:

First band 30 sighting someone from the Bay Area California just posted on HoFo:

Sounds like it has yet to be enabled on the account level. Usually done by going online and enabling "Advanced calling 1.0", or maybe calling in, but since that's your employers account getting that done may be a bit harder than usual.

Do you have VoLTE enabled on the iPhone 6?

Glad to see #1 and #3 largest cities are scheduled for 2/2 shutoff. Good riddance!

Verizon has been densifying in my suburban county for awhile now, just recently went live on a T-Mo/Sprint tower, they'll be surpassing AT&T in density soon. I'm sure B2 refarming is also underway, they have enough for 15x15 here. The older pre-LTE sites have all their legacy equipment as well as B13 and B4 antennas, 4 panels per sector I believe. The newer full build sites are 2 panels per sector, and there's an LTE only site that is just 1 panel per sector broadcasting both B4 and B13.

You're not missing much not being completely with the times... At least you can try VoLTE now! (If you can get it enabled on the account)

EPRP is an employee account. I was always directed to employee reps, and I couldn't upgrade anywhere but corporate (yeah right), and online or telesales.

Good phone care was one thing sprint had going for it, they weren't perfect but they were the most consistent of any company I've had to call into several times and the most polite. If that goes by the wayside that would be quite a shame considering corporate retail as a rule of thumb has been horrendous. (Though I do acknowledge that some have reported good experiences). I won't jump to any conclusions, but this sounds bad.

I think it's funny every time things get shut down over an unreliable weather forecast. I like the storms that are unexpected, we've had 22" of snow fall in one night before completely out of the blue (thank you lake effect) and we dug out and moved on as if it were 2". But god forbid the weatherman forecast anywhere near 24" and then it's all doom and gloom...

Wanna say that's definitely CA. I don't think 10x10 could get that high in reality as that speed is right about where the max theoretical for 10 MHz FDD lies. I don't think AT&T really has a marketing name for its CA.

It's a shame that they build a great new network and then can't seem to keep it going smoothly. I wonder if that has anything to do with Ericsson?

You still waiting it out on 3G?

I'll believe it when I see it. Until then the talk of doing it is just BS as far as I'm concerned.

Seems like the logical thing to do at least in areas like mine where the Sprint network is somewhere in between the big two and T-Mobiles in terms of density is crank B25 up to get as much range out of it as possible, strong blanket coverage should be easily achievable at spacing of 2-3 miles apart (as it is now most of it is blanket but gets real flaky in between cells or if you blink wrong), and turn up B26 to also blanket everything, ignoring the risk of it crashing and implement an aggressive algorithm to keep all devices on B25 until reaching -118 dbm or so, leaving B26 as the last resort everyone assumed it would be in the first place. and B41 (2 x B41 in the more crowded areas) should do just fine at keeping the two 5 Mhz FDD B25 carriers we have from crashing (one of them being upsized to 10 Mhz FDD). Makes sense doesn't it? The way It is now doesn't...

Ok so you by basically ruling out the multimodal equipment as the issue (thanks for the info btw), points to it just simply being poor optimization even with B25 then in the case of the signal not traveling very far while competitors have no problem doing it from similar site locations on similar frequencies. In Lake County, IN, Verizon and AT&T do NOT have better site density than Sprint, considerably worse in fact but the big two do a very good job making it's mid band travel well. So I guess that leads me back to my original statement of these issues being anyones best guess and points at incompetence. *cough* Ericsson *cough*