koiulpoi

Interesting. Is this an issue with all tri-band phones? I see very little info in the article itself about the S4 Mini, the Mega, and the One MAX, and the headline calls out two LG devices...

Man, that took me too long. I was super confused, and then remembered that BlackBerry Ltd née RIM is a Canadian company...

Exactly, I really hope its priced so that I can easily buy one straight up which is what I am planning on doing anyway.  I was considering the note 3 off contract but this will definitely be worth it if costs half as much as the note.

I hope so as well, but I'm kinda not counting on it. After all, the MSRP for the Sprint Galaxy Nexus was $549.99, a sizable $200 more than the Google Play one.

Sprint does not want customers to be able buy their phones for cheap because that would mean people are not renewing their contracts making them "high risk" customers. I am sure the system setup will be similar to the iphone in the sense that the device will already need to be in the Sprint system in order to activate on a subscriber.

Here's a dirty little secret: every CDMA iPhone, whether it be for Sprint, Verizon, Cricket, or any other carrier I'm forgetting, is already in the system. Sprint will activate any of them, it's just that Apple's activation servers won't, due to them locking each device to a specific carrier.

When you make a voice call, the Sprint network will suspend your data session while your call is routed to a legacy MSC by the LTE Mobility Management Entity. 

 

When you disconnect, you data session will continue.

 

Sprint went to this hybrid concept to eliminate the need for two radios (CDMA and LTE) in the handsets

Erm... the issue has absolutely nothing to do with what Sprint is doing on the backend, and what you're talking about doesn't even make sense with what we know and what has been observed. Devices with SVDO and SVLTE work just fine, you know. It just requires two separate transmission paths. In the phone. Voice routing (as it goes over CMDA 1X), AFAIK, should have nothing to do with LTE routing.

...is that grumpy cat?

Forced to keep the 2G network? Huh? I guess you could say that. They would have a very hard time staying in business without voice and SMS service.

I think they were referring to iDEN/NEXTEL.

Not to start a philosophical debate here, but realism is not the opposite of optimism; it's on a separate axis entirely. One can be a realistic optimist; it's quite easy. Watch: "Network vision is coming, it gets a little bit more done every day! Sprint's getting better and better!"

@Rob, you having this for 10 days sounds about right. Preferred retailers get our information just before the general public does, a good deal of time after internal sources do.

This was in my inbox yesterday! I feel... marginally special I got to read this 23 hours earlier than everyone else

Awesome article digiblur!

What I'm curious about is, is there any way to then identify, using GEO/SID/NID, exactly what network is what? In the example of GEO 4, SID 85 is "Negative", and I've found myself curious as to what network and what band that could possibly be that is CDMA yet lacks a proper roaming agreement beyond 911.