utiz4321

Sprint users lose cell service

 

HAMPTON ROADS (WAVY) - Sprint customers are experiencing a loss of service in Chesapeake and Virginia Beach.

 

Officials told WAVY.com cell towers are down and technicians are working on the issue and hope to have it fixed by 3 p.m.

 

Users may not be able to use the internet or text with their devices.

 

Stay with WAVY.com for more information on this developing story.

 

 

 

 

https://www.wavy.com/news/local/sprint-users-lose-cell-service

 

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There isn't much of a story here but it's still a shame to see.

 

Does anyone have any first hand experience how widespread it was? Or if it was just a tower here and there?

 

I wonder what would cause a large scale outage.... (If it was, indeed, that.)

 

If this was already posted elsewhere, I apologize. I did attempt to look for it.

Cell service outages happen all the time.

Well they are looking at bring it back for the business space. Nextel must still have some cache with When Cingular bought ATT wireless since the landline ATT was still around they could use the name and sent hundreds of millions in branding for Cingular just to spent about a billion rebranding a few years later when sbc bought the rest of ATT. They did it because the ATT brand was worth more, it's the same here. The nextel brand has more value with business customers than te sprint brand or at least sprint thinks so. If it does it will only help them to bring it back so good for them.

We need to get back on topic, or the astroturfer won. He derailed the thread and just has everyone talking about Sprint negatively. He may have been banned, but his legend lives on. He is laughing his ass off. We have all been played. Even me.

 

Robert via Samsung Note 8.0 using Tapatalk Pro

Sorry to bring this back up but I support your decision. I have self identified as working for a competer and have at times been critical of sprint. I have never felt unfairly treat in any thread or by any member of the staff even when they have disagreed with me.

 

 

Percentage of on contract customers who'd switch to new providers would likely switch to:

 

Sprint: 9 %

AT&T: 10 %

Verizon 19 %

T-Mobile: 26%

Yes, yes. This is rather old news. I think you need to listen to Hesse a little bit more. Sprint is in a kind of holding pattern when it comes to adding subs. They want to make sure new customers have a first class network experiance which they can't get right now. It wouldn't profit sprint to ramp up the marketing machine just to get customers on a network that is in the middle of being totally replaced. Tmobile on the other hand in angling to get bought out. They are in a full court press to acquire customers and get purchased before their balance sheet starts to go negative. This explains these most of these numbers.

As I sit here reading this thread and all the other media outlets that are continuing on the hate Sprint and hate Sprint/Softbank buying T-Mobile bandwagon, i am left to wonder what the hell are these folks going to do (complain about) once the merger gets approved (and you know it will regardless whether they like it or not) and New Sprint becomes a force to be reckon with. Granted it won't be overnight.

Still, unlimited isn't going away, neither will uncarrier. And if the rumor is true that T-Mobile will pay off ETF fees and that is integrated with the newly formed company, then AT&T and Verizon will certainly have a formidable opponent in the new Sprint.

 

TS

If you don't think uncarrier doesn't go away or become nothing more than a marking tool your going to be quite surprised. Reduced competition is never good for the consumer and tmobile's move are unsestainable in the long run even if they merge with sprint. If this merge goes through you will start to see sprint act more like the big two.

Google "T-Mobile $30 plan"; click first result.. he's not lying. It's a prepaid plan, but there's not much difference between T-Mo's prepaid and postpaid plans nowadays. It's a pretty darn good value too- I wish Sprint offered something similar.

 

Regarding the deemphasis on limited minute plans, I wonder if that is a way to prep the market for data-only VoLTE plans? I'm not sure if networks will have a reliable means of distinguishing between VoIP and other data traffic. I hope they will.

Found it. Personally I hope they don't. 100 minutes in total a month is extremely inadequate for most consumers. This is a niche offering and the proof is in the fact that no other carrier is moving to match it. But this still distracts from my main point. In order for the carriers to have the incentive to invest in the networks, innovate and deploy new technology they need to be able to earn a return on their investments. Which means more services is going to cost more (why spend billions on deploying 4g if you can't recover the cost of this deployment). It is pretty clear that tmobile is angling to get bought out. the game they are playing is add as many subs as quick as possibly and get bought before our balance sheet goes to hell.

Thank you for your curt response. I never said that I was going to get that from sprint. Unfortunately sprint kicked me out cause I was roaming too much. So now I have a tmo plan for $30, which BTW has lower minutes and more high speed data ;P

 

 

-Luis

according to tmobile's website the lowest plan they have is 50 a month which only has 500 mb of high speed data and you have to pay for a phone. My comment was more general and has do with people complaining about paying more for cell service while at the same time using more services. More services cost well more.

I find this to be true. Lower minutes and a lower bill. But unfortunately I feel like these companies keep these high minute plans to be able to charge more, since no one ever really uses them. IMO.

 

 

-Luis

Look, you are not going to get lower minutes and lower bills. You are not going to to get lower bills. You are getting more out of a cell phone and straining the network even more than ever with out using voice. Data consumption is the great cost of a user not voice so why would a carrier give you a break for using less of something that it dosnt cost them anything for you to use while at the same time you are using more of what does cost them money? We use cell phones a lot more than we did 5 years ago prices are going to go up.

Anyone who thinks that Sprint is moving slowly is a misinformed idiot. What Sprint is basically doing is simultaneously operating a coast to coast network of ~40,000 towers while building a completely new and cutting edge network of ~40,000 towers. It's a huge undertaking. It's like the equivalent to Sprint deciding to go over to Europe and building a new network from scratch over the entire continent in only 3 years. I am not sure if people really realize the size of this country, the size of a national network here and how quickly nearly an entire modern network was built. It's only been a handful of years. If someone asked me to estimate the time frame for a project like this, I'd guess at the very least it'd take a decade just for a basic network to be established. It's only been a couple of years. That has to be one of the most ridiculous and awe inspiring achievements in the history of the modern world.

Slowly is a relative term. What they are doing is incredible and there are proceeding quickly. However, the original timeline had them being complete with only a negligible amount of towers needing work. So compared to this timeline they are in fact moving slow.

I am aware of this, but the key factor of Shannon-Hartley and virtually any property of wireless is the power levels used. For example, one vendor's CDMA/LTE gear supports up to 20W for CDMA 1X and 60W for LTE, but when both are being used, LTE is limited to 20W. That same vendor's UMTS/LTE gear allows up to 80W for UMTS and LTE simultaneously. All things equal, you are correct. But if an "overlay" or secondary network did not share radio paths with the CDMA network, LTE can use higher power levels. Sprint does not do this with ESMR or PCS, but it will do this with BRS+EBS.

 

And I expect that you know that power levels are a critical deciding factor in coverage.

 

And you know very well that there are ways to work around limitations in power levels, even without more cell sites.

Correct me if I am wrong but another problem VoLte is that a call requires more spectrum resources to place than 1x and a great deal more 1xadvanced.

I think it would be pretty cool if Sprint does to T-Mobile what Softbank did to Sprint. Give T-Mobile a ton of cash so that T-Mobile can build-out/upgrade their network, and when it's great like Sprint's, Sprint can profit off it!

Where would sprint get a ton of cash?

So I have a 3G accepted site near my work and every third phone call I either get static so bad te other person can't understand a word I am saying or I get connected to myself.....I have full signal. Anyone have any ideas as to what is going on?

Don't know if anyone has read this article or if it has been posted but.....

 

6 Reasons Sprint Shouldn't Buy T-Mobile. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2428370,00.asp

In broad strokes and especially the stuff about competitiveness I think this article is spot on.

I don't see why y'all seem to think Unlimited data is a good thing. I basically forces everyone that doesn't use a lot of data to subsidize the people that do. The problem in the US is the big 2 charge a ton for very little data. If you look at our European counterparts they offer data at a much more reasonable rate. EE in the UK offer unlimited talk/text plus 10gb for 53 pounds a month. or 20gb for 58. you couldn't even get 1gb for that amount on verizon or att

In the uk you have limited lte options. In part that is the result of regulation but part is the low revenue generated by having 4 carrier compete over 60 million or so users (which is the result of regulation). But the pricing is good.

Sprint would have no reason to keep unlimited data and lower prices if it had the scaleable size, bulk and network size of AT&T or Verizon. They only do it because they have to right now.

 

It's obvious that Sprint was never really against "reducing competition," in the AT&T-T-Mo deal despite their pretense. They were just afraid of being in last place among the top four. Screw the customer.

None of these companies are trying to screw customers, this is hyperbolely and it takes things way to far. These companies are profit maximizing organization and if the cost of allowing unlimited smart phone data plans no longer offers the same payoffs that it once did because the structer of the market place and sprint did not change they would be doing a disservice to their shareholders. Many, many customers in the US DONT HAVE unlimited data and are fine. The two largest carriers do not offer unlimited data and they continue to grow (ie customer seem to like what they are getting for giving up unlimited data). If the market place doesn't reward unlimited data and it cost companies more why should they continue to offer it?

My point is a nationwide carrier in Europe is akin to a regional carrier in the US. It is much easier to be a national carrier in Europe than the US. You have to compare continent wide carriers in Europe to nationwide carriers in the US. And national carriers to regional carriers here to get closer to apples to apples, in my opinion. But I get it that you disagree. That's fine.

 

I stand behind my point that three strong national carriers with healthy regulation leveling the playing field for regionals is plenty fine for competition. I just don't see any government entity denying a Sprint purchase of Tmo outright. It would just likely be highly conditional.

 

AT&T probably could have closed the deal with Tmo if it were willing to make a lot of concessions. But they wanted Tmo specifically to screw consumers. And the FCC knows that. SoftBank's motive is not to screw consumers, but to have a better position to compete. Scale is huge when negotiating contracts. Including backhaul.

 

Robert via Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

Size wise you may have a point and I think I mention in my original post that the physical size differences between the US and European nations make the return to scale a totally different animal, but this is some what off set by the larger US market. As far as comparing Europe as a whole to the US as a whole this is no where near comparing apples to apples. There are not barriers to trade or language barriers or vast differences in law codes with in the US and there is in Europe. While the union and common currency do a great deal to make Europe more integrated it is in no way comparable to the integration of the US. My main point is you are taking an industry that until metro and leap where gobbled up, there where 5-6 firms serving most markets and nearly all major markets down to 2-3 after a tmobile sprint merge ( some rural markets are serviced by one Regional and one national carrier). 5-6 where probably to many three will be to few. Tmobile is the disrupters in the industry right now, they are the ones making the moves that are changing the industry and all the other carriers, including sprint are following their lead. Take them out and I think we will see the industry petrify (pr at lest slow) which would be sad I such a dynamic industry.

In Europe, there are not 4 carriers that span the whole EU. Each country typically has one national carriers, one or two large European carriers and perhaps a small local carrier. We count the locals when we tout European open markets, but when we talk about in the U.S., we only discuss the big national ones. We need to be fair and include the USCC's, Cincy Bells, CSpires et all in our conversations.

 

Most European countries do not have 4 large continent wide carriers in each country. They just don't. There are much smaller carriers in that mix. And we need to do more more the smaller carriers in this country...like access to LTE roaming from their competitors at reasonable rates and guaranteed availability to the device ecosystem. Three national carriers and an even playing field for the locals would ensure a very vibrant US carrier competition. I could see even spectrum divestiture to smaller local wireless companies as part of this approval.

 

I'm still not for this. But I think it could be done responsibly. And if it can be done so responsibly, there is no reason for the government to block it. The government does not to exist to impose its will upon companies. It exists to make sure the best solution can be had for the public good. And there is a route to do that here, if SoftBank and Tmo can agree on all the terms that would likely get handed down to make this work.

 

Robert

Well my statement was that industrialize nations tend to have four major carriers. France: orange sfr Bouygues and free mobile, uk: EE voda o2 3 Spain: movestar voda orange yoig Italy TIM voda wind 3 and it keeps going, almost all western European countries have 4 major carriers. Luxembourg has two. If your going to through in regional carriers in to them mix to argue that the US will still be competitive after a sprint tmobile merger, the thing you have to remember is regional carriers generally serve areas that don't have all of the national carriers competing in them. Japan has 4 also.

The immediate histrionics from T-Mobile fanboys and the magenta loving tech press are downright annoying. A few thoughts...

• Sprint-Nextel merger. The negative allusions to an eight year old merger under different leadership are misplaced. If any wireless operator has learned from the mistakes of a poorly executed, drawn out integration strategy, it is Sprint. That learning will serve Sprint well in any future mergers. Additionally, Sprint and Nextel were on different planets both spectrally and technologically. Times have changed. Sprint and T-Mobile are now more similar than many seem to realize.
• 600 MHz auction. Sprint and T-Mobile do not want to bid against one another should the auction actually happen in 2015. That would just inflate bidding and practically ensure that one or the other would come away empty handed in many markets, as there will not be enough spectrum to go around for four national operators plus regional operators.
• Site redundancy. Running four national networks basically in parallel is a great deal for tower companies but a bad deal for wireless operators. So many Sprint sites are redundant to T-Mobile sites and vice versa that major cost savings could be had by consolidating site locations. Decommission redundant sites, add new spectrum to remaining sites, maintain similar coverage footprint with increased capacity for combined subscriber base. Sprint knows this.
• 3GPP conversion. For harmonization and economy of scale, Neal Gompa thinks that Sprint needs to go full 3GPP by adding W-CDMA for voice fallback until VoLTE becomes the de facto standard. Some of us disagree with his sentiments against CDMA2000 as reactionary and premature. Moreover, Sprint does not have sufficient PCS spectrum to deploy a W-CDMA 1900 carrier in many markets. A combined Sprint-T-Mobile, however, would provide more than enough PCS spectrum for such a conversion/overlay.
• Legere elimination. A merged Sprint-T-Mobile would send buffoonish CEO John Legere off into the sunset. Enough said.

AJ

I agree with most of everything you say except the part about site redundancy. 4 carriers seems to be the norm in most industrial nations around the world, Canada has 3 to serve 20 million. We would have the same to serve a market of over 300 million. In my mind this means oligopoly rents being extracted at consumer expense.

I hope this doesn't go through. The US wireless market would be very uncompetitive I think at three major carriers. Most European countries have four and much smaller populations (although much smaller geographic areas so returns to scale aren't as high).

Unfortunately, on workdays Sprint's data is unusable in downtown SF (Financial district) like 50% of the times. And when I say unusable, I mean no data at all. The phone is timing out when trying to resolve DNS on LTE. If I switch to 3G, I get speeds that are embarrassingly close to zero (0.15 - 0.05 Mbps). And in general, you need to do constant airplane mode, power cycle etc. to get data to work. Other carriers might be slower at times / locations, but nothing as bad.

I am seeing it even while on the street.

In fact, I once noticed it just when I was in front of the Sprint store on market st. So I decided to walk in and check how other phones are doing, to eliminate an issue with my phone. The guy there told me I don't need to try. They are all getting the same (close to zero) speeds that I do..

The problem is not slow speeds. The network is just unreliable at the moment. There are also voice issues: lots of dropped calls.

I really hope that things will get better soon enough, but right now the service in downtown SF is just bad.

 

By the way, SF does not have spark. It doesn't even officially have LTE yet.

Downtown SF is no where near complete. In a dense city like SF Samsung and sprint really should have kept lte off limits to the consumers until all the towers (at least in the financial district) where live with lte. For a lot a of people who don't know what is going on this is going to leave them with a bad impression of sprint's lte network.

Well, what do you think is happening in your pocket? About 10-20 dB of attenuation...

 

AJ

I wouldn't have thought it was that much. But that seems to be what is happening.

So just started getting lte in my house. One of the three towers that I am about equal distant from has been upgraded (two are closer and one of those is the one upgraded). I normally get about -107 to -114 dBm, sometimes lte drops off but rarely. The weird thing is that every time I put my phone in my pocket for longer than 30 sec lte drops and when I pull my phone back out 3G again. Left out hardly every drops out of lte. Any ideas?

The tower on Broadway and Dobson is broadcasting lte. Before you ask I have an iPhone so can't map it. But happy thanksgiving to me I get lte in my home

The article wasn't about Network Vision. The article was about the poor customer experience at Sprint. Bravo to Consumer Reports for deducting points for the "pardon our dust" state of the Sprint Network.

 

The lack of upgrades and lack of information from Sprint have been frustrating for many. It's been so frustrating that it led to the creation of this very site so that people could regain some sanity.

 

Maybe in a few years Consumer Reports will reconsider.

I think it is hard for people in the s4gru community to realize that the vast majority of consumers don't care about what Sprint is doing with their network, they only care about their service working and right now in a lot of places it doesn't. Consumer reports is made up of people who are not looking at what sprint is doing with there network but people who only care about their service working. I work in and love the wireless industry and sprint is making some of the most exciting moves in it, that keeps me glued to them. No body that reads (and takes seriously) consumer reports cares to much about the wireless industry.

Things like this are to be expect led when rebuilding a network from the ground up. What really sucks for sprint (and their customers) is the six month delay NV has had put on it. That means 6 more months of building up a bad reputation, customer defections and delays rebranding effort.