utiz4321

Well look, I know for a fact att is having the same issues with people that switch to their new value plans and I'll bet vzw is having the same issues. When they (all of the carriers) decided to play we charge you one thing but give you a credit and then not give people who changed plans a prorated credit they where asking for a bad customer experience but that is what they all decided to do. So calling and getting them to credit your account is all you can do.

I had the same problem. I called into customer care and they credited me the framily discount for the prorated part of the bill.

VZw and ATT customer don't pay top dollar to get service everywhere, not even in there home town because ATT and vzw or any wireless provider for that matter don't offer service everywhere. Not even in a coverage area, read the disclaimers on their coverage maps if you are skeptical.

I don't get how this is suppose to work.

They dont have to. They more than likely will a little but not much, zero precent financing on the phone bill will countinue to support phone prices, i believe anyway. I think everyone who works in the industry is glad to see subsidies go away. You want a high end phone buy one, like a tv.

I am not all that knowledgeable but is a 25 ms differences important to any function that might be preformed on a smartphone. If not this is not an artivle that should have even been written.

And how do you know exactly you are being throttled? Simply seeing speeds around 2mb isn't really proof. Maybe there are a few other people who like to clog lte by constantly downloading music (or videos). And why not download music (I assuming torrents) to your PC?

Not really. Both ATT and vzw had a 550 family plan for years that never showed up on any brochures of pricing plans. Companies have offers they do not advertise all the time for example at Starbucks you can get a "short" (extra small, I guess) but you'll never see it on their menue. They could keep two year offers as an offer strictly to go after that part of the market unwilling to give up two year contracts. That said after properly educating customers I don't think the subset of customers that still require a two year contract to get their business will be all that large.

Not at all. This will allow them to keep unlimited data for years to come and I think sprint management believes that reliable unlimited data will be enough of a differentiator to make them profitable. The problem I see is they need 2.6 to make that reliable network and so they will have by the end of 2015 a reliable data network in the top 100 markets. Sprint's management believes that will be enough I am skeptical but hey they make a lot more than me and know a lot more than me so they are probably right.

I would agree with you if all vzw was going to do in the 2 years was deploy aws but they are not, they'll make their network denser. Sprint's network will only be as better than others in the top 100 markets and only by the end of 2015. Look my point is that the market and other carriers aren't standing still, sprint has an awesome advantage in their 2.6 holdings but that advantage declines over time. As other carriers begin freeing up more spectrum and look at carrier agrogation sprint advantage becomes less and less just like the WiMAX advantage declined over time.

There is alot in this article i disagree with, but the last paragraph. I think was spot on. By the time spark is deployed in 100 markets vzw will more than likely have aws deployed across their lte network, so it is hard to see spark being that much of a differentiator for them. It reminds me of their wimax deployment, they had wimax nearly a year before vzw began their lte roll out but limited avalibilty and the vzw lte overtaking them made wimax a bust for sprint. At least with wimax they could point to the capital markets collapse as the reason but there is no shortage of funds this time around.

Sprint has committed to covering 100 million pops not markets. Far fewer than 100 markets can get 100 million pops covered.

Could your source have meant 2 million for 2013 or did they mean the 4 quarter?

What he looks like is irrelevent and again if he can sell his stake for a bit of a profit there is no egg on his face. Son bought Sprint on a turn around story, in fact he said sprint was in the midst of a turn around when he bought then. The lost of 2 million customers put the lie to that. That is the lost of over a billion in yearly revenue and the competitive landscape isnt getting better if tmobile remaind indepentdant.

In the forth quarter? Then i could see Son looking for an exist if the tmobile deal is off the table.

Your right so long as Son can't get out 31 billion. This whole thing is starting to remind me of when HP bought palm, lots of talk about webos becoming the center of a new hp until the they hit head winds and have up. I don't think SoftBank is going to drop sprint (I don't think they can get out for anything less than a major haircut) but it is possible. SoftBank has lost 25 billion or so of martlet value over the head winds faced in this merger. That is almost the value of their investment.

I just love the fact the the company that is doing the lease to respond to competition runing to the government trying to get them to intervene so they can maintain their margins with offering anything innovating.

This was very helpful. Then I guess sprint is deploying beam forming on 2.6. That is if I am interpreting everything correctly. Thanks.

I think he was talking about the base station being 8t8r (8 transmit and 8 receive, antennas) and in any case that is what they are deploying for 2.6. If it was useless to handsets because of size constrants it weird that they would deploy it and claim it would give then better propagatiib.

Yeah but he knows quite a bit and is smart enough not to claim that they are going to see better coverage than they are (at least i hope so). So i listen to a webcast hosted by citi (a little more recent) and he said something about 8t8r allows for better link budgets and thus for better propagation charecteristics. But i not super technical and dont kniw why that would be. Something to research but if any one thinks they could explain i would be glad of it.

If you havent already and have the time there is a webcast of Dan Hesse speaking at a UBS event in December last year (which can be accessed on sprints investor relations page) where he states sprint is seeing td 2.6 having similar propagation characteristics as FD 1900. From the context it didn't seem he was talking about in a densified network just flat out they where similar. He did go into much detail though. Also a few earnings calls back someone had mentioned that SoftBank was seeing better propagation characteristics than expected on their 2.6 and asked Hesse to comment but he didn't really. I don't think SoftBank uses beamforming but this peak my interest. Anyway if you have it is an interesting conversation to listen to and may let me know what you think he is talking about.

Of course Verizon wants tmobile to merge with some one. The fewer players the more market power for the firms and the more they can extract from consumers. The fact that vzw wants more consolidation even when they are not involved should tell everyone something, namely it's good for the firms bad for consumers. It is interest that the host admitted that the US has fewer players that most other countries.

I think this was posted in another forum but JD power needs to entitle their surveys "not much separates the wireless carriers" or some such. The surveys are large so the standard error is pretty low but what does it mean to say there is 40 point of 1000 spread between best and worst? The is a 4 percent difference between the best and worst customer care? It may be statistically significant but in practice terms sounds to me like they are the same.

From comments made by Dan Hesse it seems sprint is seeing TD 2.6 having the same propagation characteristics as 1900 FD. Do you or any one else know why that would be or how they are achieving this?

If you get a signal that's capacity is max out it doesn't really matter how strong it is. You can have a high frequency network that penetrates buildings if you make it dense enough. With small cells and the propagation that they are getting out of TDD 2.6 they can design a network that performs very well in building.