RedSpark

https://www.wabe.org/atlanta-among-first-in-line-for-5g-service-and-now-a-phone-is-coming/ In Atlanta, Sprint is focused on throwing the switch sometime before the Super Bowl in early February, says Heather Campbell, Sprint’s Director of RF Engineering. “Our goal is to really show everything we can do at the Super Bowl and make it fantastic.” ________ Nice!

Good point. We’re still on Unlimited Freedom because we don’t use much Hotspot at all and switching to Unlimited Plus to get Free Tidal would actually cost us more than we’re paying now. We’re on the original Corporate Discount scheme of $5/Month off per line (we have 7 Lines) and I’m afraid that if we switch plans we’ll lose it. So we’re keeping what we have. I’d rather have the Apple Music Family Plan ($14.99/Month for 6 Users) to be honest, but we haven’t bothered getting it yet. YouTube works fine.

Weak passwords let a hacker access internal Sprint staff portal “Using two sets of weak, easy-to-guess usernames and passwords, a security researcher accessed an internal Sprint staff portal. Because the portal’s log-in page didn’t use two-factor authentication, the researcher — who did not want to be named — navigated to pages that could have allowed access customer account data.” All you need is a phone number and a PIN, but as there was no limit on the number of PIN attempts, you’d just cycle through them all until you got access. Disgraceful.

You should reach out to Sprint’s Business Sales Team: https://business.sprint.com/contact-us/ They should be able to provide direction on this.

Any news yet on the new GEN 3 Magic Box being released? I hope Sprint isn’t running into production issues like it had for prior versions of the Magic Box. Did they prematurely EOL the GEN 2 units?

https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/fcc-denies-motion-to-stop-clock-t-mobile-sprint-deal The FCC has denied a request to stop the clock or extend the pleading cycle associated with the proposed T-Mobile/Sprint combination. Denial: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-18-870A1.pdf

See this FCC Filing that Sprint submits on a monthly basis: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/10801544322248/800 MHz Monthly Report for August 2018.pdf

That’s encouraging to hear! I have family north of Bowie Mill Road in the area northwest of Norbeck Country Club, bounded between 108 to the northeast and 115 to the southwest. Outdoor coverage in that area has been terrible for years.

So I should turn on both data and voice roaming?

Sprint has to get on the right side of the curve to get adds, which leads to cash flow, which enables network upgrades... and effective marketing of that improved performance leads to more adds. Unfortunately, SoftBank hasn’t contributed enough capital to get Sprint on a positive feedback loop of the aforementioned. Agree 100%: Sprint was in terrible shape when Marcelo came on board. I recall the early conference transcripts where Marcelo said his employees couldn’t explain Sprint’s value proposition to him and where he said Sprint’s 10% share of gross adds rendered it effectively irrelevant: https://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/call-transcript.aspx?StoryID=2675845&Title=sprints-s-ceo-marcelo-claure-presents-at-wells-fargo-technology-media-and-telecom-conference-transcript “And I’ll tell you probably my biggest surprise is, what I’d like to call, the monthly market share or better referred as, share of gross adds. And in the month of August, I think I took my first day in the job was August 12 in Kansas City, our share of gross adds was 10%. When you’re 10%, that means you are not even part of the conversation, you’re irrelevant. When you go from a – when you have a market share of 16%, and a share of gross adds of 10%, that means you are under-indexing your true capabilities. So that was a big surprise, one of the things that we found. Secondly, what’s the amount of customers leaving us in comparison to coming? So we were network negative. The quality of our subscribers that we were attracting, they were lot more in sub-prime area than I would have liked.” “So, those sort of things were a big surprise. And I would have liked to have a little more time to understand, let's say, everything on the business, but when you look at those numbers, you just don’t have time.”

Right with you... We have a number of 3G sites in parts of Maryland surrounding DC. Every time I visit family in Derwood outside of Rockville, service tanks to a mix of None/1x or 3G at best... outdoors. I’ve reported it for years now.

Great question!

Interesting “behind the scenes” news: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sprint-corp-m-a-t-mobile-us/t-mobile-runs-behind-the-scenes-pr-push-to-support-sprint-deal-idUSKCN1L512A

Nice YouTube video of a Site Upgrade with 2.5 GHz.

If I turn roaming on, am I at risk of hitting the domestic roaming limit here in the DC area? This isn’t something I wanted to pay attention to or risk having service frozen/cancelled over. I have all the Auto Update over cellular functions on my device enabled.

I would like to as well.

Massive MIMO is actually a very cost effective upgrade for both LTE and 5G: Dr. saw shared much more detail about the cost efficiencies of Massive MIMO are realized in this article: https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/sprint-cto-parts-curtain-carrier-s-5g-buildout-process-goals-and-phones Saw today said that, after Sprint’s technicians install the antenna/radio units and the baseband units, the carrier later will have to install a channel card into the baseband unit in order to turn on 5G services. However, he said that work will cost much less because technicians won’t have to climb the tower in order to install the channel card; instead, they can drive to the base of the tower and install the channel card into the baseband unit at the bottom of the tower. Then, Saw said, Sprint can activate 5G services through a remote software upgrade. The company has promisedto launch its nationwide mobile 5G network in first half of 2019. Interestingly, Samsung’s Nyffeler explained that the company’s antenna/radio units will be able to support both 5G and LTE services—and will be able to remotely allocate more spectral capacity toward one technology or the other. That means, Nyffeler said, that Sprint will be able to dynamically take 2.5 GHz spectrum away from its LTE network and allocate it to its 5G network as customer demand grows, without technicians having to climb the company’s towers. Saw cautioned that Sprint would likely keep a significant amount of spectrum dedicated to its LTE network since its customers currently use that technology. _________________ This sounds pretty awesome. Because Sprint has so much 2.5 Spectrum, it’s able to do this. The more Massive MIMO sites there are, the better the LTE network will be today and the better the 5G network will be in the future.

I wonder when we’re going to see this on the ALU (Nokia) gear here in the DC Market. I hope they’re swapping out the legacy Clearwire equipment for Massive MIMO.

The NYC update is great news. Hopefully the next “city update” comes soon, before the halo effect of this one fades. You could make a case that it would be better for Sprint to announce this kind of good news for multiple cities at once... if it’s actually possible to do that. It may not be given Sprint’s deployment/upgrade pace.

WiFi is coming in 2019: https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2018/04/buckeye_fans_will_finally_have.html “Ohio State had signed a contract with Verizon in 2012 to bring WiFi to the stadium and basketball arena by fall 2015, but the installation did not occur. WiFi was put on hold as Ohio State sued the company.” “University officials said the lawsuit is still pending.”

Based on this earlier Tweet, New Orleans seems like it’s about to get some upgrades:

Based on the size of the Redaction Blocks/Text Size in Footnote 75 of the Public Interest Statement, the Massive MIMO deployment figure appears to be in the 4 digit range in 2018, reaching the 5 digit range in 2019.

That’s a great question and point you raised. We experienced this with 8T8R antennas where it seemed like the news about them vastly exceeded the actual deployments. Sprint laid out its 5G deployment expectations in its Public Interest Statement on Pages 23-25: https://newtmobile.com/content/uploads/2018/06/T-Mobile-Sprint-Public-Interest-Statement.pdf It’s not a particularly rosy picture. There’s a lot more detail in the subsequent pages. The specific number of Massive MIMO sites Sprint expects to update in 2018-2019 and by 2020 is redacted.

That’s a great point. We’ve seen this happen with Sprint before, where it would gain the lead in a flagship market like Chicago only to lose it after 6 - 12 Months as the other carriers catch up. Is the pace of network improvements at this point primarily limited by available capex, available work crews or available equipment? I hope they can bring some strand mounts or other rapid network improvements to the Bethany Beach, DE and Ocean City, MD areas. I was there several years ago and the network coverage was terrible. I currently have family there now on Sprint (with an S8+ and HTC U11) and they’re telling me it’s still terrible.

Is that the one in Brooklyn?