RedSpark

7 hours ago, S4GRU said:

All it took was money.  Network Vision was planned properly initially, but not properly implemented due to finances.  I remember hearing early into the Network Vision deployment the CFO says publicly something to the effect of, 'The beauty of the Network Vision deployment plan is that we can ramp up or slow down as necessary depending on finances or need.'  It was scary to hear then, and even scarier to think of in retrospect.  They were confessing that they were always concerned about how to financially pull it off that the had contingency plans of how to "half-ass" it if necessary.  And they did half-ass it, and it likely was necessary.  But they did.

And then once you get used to losing, you forget how to win.  We finally got to the point that no amount of money would fix the problem anyway.  Network wise, Tmo merging with Sprint will likely be a very superior position than both going alone.  The big tell in time, is what it will do to competition and pricing for the long term.  That's the part we don't know. 

Will it be worth it 5 years from now?  Who knows?  But at least we will enjoy the network improvements in the interim.  But even that is not totally all everyone dreamed it would be in the short term.  I guess nothing is perfect, but we always imagine it will be.

Robert

Yup, the money never came. Even so, I don't think Sprint had enough lowband spectrum to effectively complete as a national carrier with strong indoor or rural coverage. Its 800 MHz just wasn't enough and Sprint didn't have enough sites or site density either.

You're absolutely right. I don't think Sprint half-assed it though. I feel tike it quarter-assed it.

4 hours ago, dkyeager said:

The triband concept really just boils down to simple communication on T-Mobile's part. Three or four items are typically all most people can easily remember and relate. 

The merger gives T-Mobile so much room for 5g conversion of bands. Unfortunately there is not as much flexibility in bandwidth per channel as there should be below 6Ghz. n25 will still be limited to 20x20 iirc. This could just be another way the duo are hammering down the nail that sticks up.

The duo were able to do this constantly with Sprint. Any advantage Sprint found would only last six months as the duo would pour in money to crush it. T-Mobile will be harder to defeat that way given better resources and marketing, but John Legere's image much harder to replicate for T-Mobile itself. Verizon may have an effective knockoff in their new CEO.  With bigger size it will be harder for T-Mobile to retain their momentum.  Fear of missing out has already started to weaken.

The shades of the Nextel merger mistakes are most concerning for me with the ways the Sprint S20 was being handled. Clearer communication needed to help people avoid new pain points.  Fortunately the Samsung band selector app was able to save them for those cases where the Sprint network was better.  We mostly preferred the plan of converting market by market first. 

The longer game is getting people to move over to 5g sooner, which benefits a carrier the most. Harder to win with customers holding on to old devices. The economy may wreak havoc with this strategy even with mid range 5g phones this summer.  Plenty of ways for T-Mobile to become Sprint.  Hopefully they are more agile. Certainly starting from a better position.

I'm sure it did an after-action on the S20 process and will have smoother rollouts in the future as additional "combined" 5G sites come online.

They'll have to keep this site upgrade/migration process rolling throughout the Spring/Summer/Fall as it's very possible that 5G iPhones could be activated directly on T-Mobile's network, and bypass Sprint's 5G network completely. In fact, I think that T-Mobile will make it a priority to wind down Sprint's 5G network and launch its own 5G in those cities for that reason.

Sprint and T-Mobile: 1H 2020 results point to a promising future

More interesting reading.

T-Mobile boasts 2.5 GHz momentum right out of the gate

Nice write-up of Neville's comments.

Any news come out of this today?

40 minutes ago, PhillipJames89 said:

Lmao this caption triggered me because Dan Hesse’s original plan was to deploy band 41 on every site 😔. 

Marcelo and Masa both had different plans unfortunately.

4 hours ago, PhillipJames89 said:

 

One good meme deserves another.

7 minutes ago, nexgencpu said:

No more "Sprint" N41 its only T-Mobile's N41 now, they just repurposed Sprints EARFCN. But since they went all in and deployed it with 4 layers enabled plus proper backhaul to support it, we are seeing these great speeds.

New T-Mobile is going to be a force to be reckoned with going forward. I don't think Verizon and AT&T realize it yet.

19 minutes ago, Yuhfhrh said:

It's been many years... but we're going to finally see the true power of 2.5GHz. Proper backhaul does wonders.

 Yup. Throw in a good dash of proper capex and management as well.

That was quick. Wow.

Progress!

13 minutes ago, dkyeager said:

Many firms will go from loving remote work, to regulating it, then to the moving the jobs overseas.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/30/work-from-home-surveillance/

Damn, that article was depressing.

Feel good PR?

T-Mobile says Sprint saw 502,000 postpaid net additions in March quarter despite phone losses

15 hours ago, JonnygATL said:

He probably has and I'm stoked for him that he can now roll with the big boys!

Oh definitely. Thou who hath the spectrum can spit hot fire.

He’s watched T-Mobile throw out the snark for years against “dumb and dumber”, not even mentioning Sprint some of the time. He’s also seen their customer adds quarter after quarter, combined with their savvy marketing. Combine that with Masa’s incompetence and lack of support. It must have been infuriating.

Now he’s gone from this:

to this...

Love it.

9 hours ago, Tengen31 said:

I find lowband 5G to be a joke. No improvement over LTE.

Sent from my SM-G975U1 using Tapatalk
 

Give it time. Lowband 5G is meant to be complemented by additional 5G spectrum.

🔥 🔥  🔥  🔥  🔥 

Saw's been waiting to say this his whole career... He's in his element now post-merger.

Great write-up about how they did it.

Between March 11th, when COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, and March 31st, T-Mobile was able to move nearly its entire customer care workforce out of its call centers across the US and into a work from home operation. That's almost 14,000 employees in just 20 days.

That's incredible.

They've now got all 17 of their internal call centers working from home along with over 92% of the Sprint care teams.

Now that they've made these moves to have people work remotely, I wonder if they'll keep it this way? Saves on the commute time/expense for the employees, and T-Mobile could save quite a bit of money as well if it doesn't renew the leases on (or sells) its call center properties. Proof of concept that it can work for the long term? Thoughts?

52 minutes ago, swintec said:

Didnt we sort of know tmo 5G was not anything to write home about?  I remember that being a big thing about the merger.  Without sprint, tmo was not going to be able to provide a decent 5G service as time went on.  They just were not in a good position spectrum wise.

Oh that's certainly true. T-Mobile had low-band 5G (which has great propagation but doesn't have the speeds of 2.5 GHz 5G) and MMwave (for which the economics of widespread deployment for 2.5 GHz compare poorly with 2.5 GHz for 5G).

What T-Mobile did have going for it was competent management and network deployment, quarter after quarter of customer additions and a tremendously successful social media presence. All it had to do was wait for Sprint to flame out and to grab its spectrum assets through the merger... and it did.

Now you'll have T-Mobile's competent management and engineers managing and building out Sprints network assets that were tremendously underutilized when they were held by Sprint. T-Mobile properly managed the windfall of Spectrum/Cash it got from the breakup fee when AT&T failed to acquired it. It also was successful in efficiently integrating MetroPCS into its core network.

If this merger had failed, Sprint would have continued to stagnate without billions of capital from Masa... and even then, the network wouldn't come close to what this combined network will be.

28 minutes ago, PhillipJames89 said:

I hope we have Tmobile 5G (2.5ghz) in the fall. Does Tmobile have MMwave here?

I hope so too! I think we will. The S20 devices are going to go through the teething process on this more than Apple launching this Fall devices will. I expect the networks to be in a very different place come this Fall.

I'm not sure if we have MMwave here yet.

21 minutes ago, derrph said:

I’ll more in likely take the Apple upgrade route this year as well. I just don’t see T-Mobile letting Sprint customers upgrade through them and letting you keep your plan. Plus if they keep their current down payment model, then they can keep that ish.


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We'll see what they're offering this Fall. They said we could keep our plans/pricing for 3 years (5 in the case of CA apparently). I don't think they'd mandate a plan switch to upgrade devices. Even so, T-Mobile's plans may be better, especially with taxes/fees included.

25 minutes ago, dewbertdc said:

For what it's worth, I've been very happy with the iPhone Upgrade Program - you're eligible for a new phone every year, the payments include AppleCare, and it doesn't cost any more than buying the phone outright + AppleCare in the end, even if you don't upgrade yearly.  Carrier integration is perfect with T-Mobile - just turn on the new phone and it's activated, the old SIM is disconnected, and you never have to interact with customer service (or get charged the $10 SIM fee and $20 assistance fee!). The device is fully unlocked, so you're free to leave T-Mobile whenever you want.

If we weren't doing iPhone leases through Sprint, we'd be doing the iPhone Annual Upgrade Program. That being said, I hope they keep the lease program the way it is. I don't want to have to pay off the entire device and do a trade-in/sell-back to upgrade.

7 hours ago, lilotimz said:

It's not as if Sprint engineers themselves didn't want to get things done. Top down decisions were made which basically precluded sprint employees from doing anything useful to improve the situation of the network. It was a multi year process but Son got what he wanted in the end after the "merger" was rejected the first time around.

 

Not that it matters anymore. It's one for the history books.

 

We'll just have to wait and see what New TM does with all the former Sprint assets they acquired.

 

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

I completely agree and I'm glad it's finally over.

11 hours ago, PhillipJames89 said:

Just in case if you haven’t seen it

"One brand" in time for the annual iPhone upgrade cycle... and the adoption rate should be huge given that it's expected to be 5G this year.

T-Mobile is showing us how things are done when you have real capex and effective, competent management. Sprint never had a chance with the clowns it had running things. Shame on you Masa/Marcelo.

I haven't seen a "Sprint-side" announcement about this (unless I missed it), but perhaps T-Mobile is speaking for both brands here?