koiulpoi

Aww, poor baby, he's realizing that mobile data is by its very nature, an expensive, shared resource, and not an unlimited fountain of streaming... streams.

 

Sure, I'll completely agree that VZW's pricing and plans are exorbitant, but much like WiMAX before it, I honestly think that LTE was oversold on its capabilities and capacity. The author says " LTE was supposed to lead to a golden age of mobile broadband where people could quickly watch videos on their smartphones and tablets", and I don't think it ever really was. In both theory and practice, that is what brings networks to its knees, 4G or no.

 

Now, if somebody was to throw 120 MHz worth of TD-LTE at it instead of 10x10 of FD-LTE, then maybe...

"Go a little further NORTH to SOUTH AVE"... man... that is one backwards town... just saying

 

@l3x

There's a street around here called "Cascade West Parkway Southeast". We have roads that change names 4 times as you keep going straight. We have a turn called the Michigan left, and they're all over the place. We have a freeway that bisects a city, and that freeway was never even supposed to be there, that connects to 3 other freeways. Things are weird around here.

You can also use Google Voice calls over data through apps like GrooveIP. Works surprisingly well.

Oh, I dunno, I like to think of iOS 7 as being Superflat, in the style of Murakami Takashi.

 

Honestly though, I see why this hasn't bothered me; parallax stuff has been in videogames for years and years.

Well... I heard a rumor from a guy who knows a guy who is totally a reliable source that SAYGO (Sprint As You Go) is going away, so SWEGO could be a replacement. Or something.

 

Or you could take this post with a bucket of salt.

Yes indeed...I think they had so many problems here they stopped the rollout until they could circle back.  I heard from some of my cage rattling with the 6 day voice outage that new procedures were put in place to prevent this in the future.  They've even left a half launched 800SMR site in one part of town.  They flipped the switch on the 800SMR rollout alright

I hope they do put in procedures like that. I hear a lot from folks that the reason 3G NV and CDMA 800 upgrades are so crucial and take so long is 911 testing. Yet, they can still end up with sites launching that would keep 911 from working.

 

It's been a tough couple of weeks here in Grand Rapids, certainly. We got a ton of 800, and it seems to be having trouble handing off to 1900. Or maybe it just likes to drop calls because it feels like it, not sure. It's been more or less extremely severe, throughout the city. It's especially bad with Artprize going on.

 

It's been pretty trying, being at the brunt of it - doubly so when Care informs people that "nothing is wrong". I know what's coming, but man, it's making me want to switch.

Anyone who thought that come July 1st, a flip of a switch was suddenly going to turn on thousands and thousands of CDMA 800 sites are nuts.

But, by the Gods, I wish it did work that way.

jeremyvbk, on 24 Sept 2013 - 4:45 PM, said:

ok, I heard if you are someone with a spending limit of any kind, you can not use this program.

You must be prime credit class. Being ASL (account spending limit) class means, unfortunately, no.

One thing to add to this thread, though, is a brief definition of "ASU" for the uninformed. If I recall correctly, the acronym stands for Absolute Signal Units.

Really? I always figured it was "arbitrary signal unit"

That is not true. Customers do pay a premium on both vzw plan and ATT but they do get benefits. For example on Att next a traditional upgrade to an iPhone 5s (or most high end phones) 236 (200+36 upgrade fee). Under next at the 12 month mark a customer would have paid 27*12=324 for the same phone, that is an 88 dollar difference over a year. So the customer pays 7.33 a month so they can upgrade once a year vs every 24 months and don't have to come up with the money up front. Now we can talk about the benefits of sell you current device and buy retail all we want but for some customers that is something worth paying a little bit more so they won't have to do that, else carrier trade in programs wouldn't be so popular. Now sprint one up plan is better, a lot better as you are still getting a subsidy and the phone works out to be cheaper but now that their are not really (at least for large family plans, 1-2 lines they still are) they need something to show customers they are a value option.

 

Did you... even read the article?

 

 

AT&T Next: No. That's it. There is no situation in which AT&T Next can be viewed as anything but a huge rip off. AT&T only spreads monthly payments out over 20 months instead of 24. Because of this, you're actually paying more than half of the phone's cost every year. If you never upgrade, you'll pay exactly the same amount as you would if you bought your handset off contract (on top of your regular service that normally includes a subsidized phone).

 

However, if you upgrade after one year, you'll end up paying more in handset payments by the end of two years than either phone is actually worth. Keep in mind, if you didn't use AT&T Next, you'd get one phone on contract. You could then buy a second phone with the money you'd save and still have some leftover. Don't do this. AT&T Next is universally bad.

You're literally spending more money than the phone. This isn't even taking in to account selling your old one. This is just you giving money to the death star.

I actually find it both fitting and hilarious that AT&T's program is in no possible way good for the consumer. It's just straight-up terrible. And VZW's is almost as bad.

snip

Thank you, this has actually been very informative for me. You know what you should do? Submit an article for the wall here! I think it'd the kind of info most of us would be interested in. After all, every smartphone has a Li-Ion battery these days...

While it is true that batteries using lithium based chemistries do not like being stored at full charge, this does not mean that float charging them for a few hours will damage them.  If it were days on end that the device remained plugged in, I could see some chemistry related issues decreasing battery life, but not over night.

Heh, you should see how some folks use their phones. Charge 8 hours overnight, let it drain for 15 minutes while driving in to work. Charge for 8-9 hours while working, let it drain for 15 minutes while driving home. Charge the rest of the time when it's at home, repeat. And for many of them, you can ignore the section about driving, thanks to car chargers. I'm fairly certain that's damaging. Not an expert, just fairly certain.

 

As for the wakelock bit, absolutely.  There are great programs out there that will specifically display wakelock activity, GSAM battery monitor is one of them.

After checking out various battery life apps, my recommendation falls to Wakelock Detector. Set it to advanced mode, and you've got a lot of incredibly useful data. The GS3 in particular can easily suffer from a wakelock involving the Media Scanner Service, which is almost always caused by corrupt media files. Usually, these files come from "FREEEE MP3 DOWNLOADER PARADISE HAPPY" apps, or something similar. Such apps also are known to display ads all over your phone and harvest your personal information, so, you know.

 

And before someone starts arguing by presenting articles written by silly popular tech sites on the internet, let me tell you that those articles aren't written by electrical engineers.  This post was.

Well, shouldn't we be asking for the expertise of a chemical engineer?

Guys and gals, there's a reason that, even with Sprint's "total equipment protection", batteries are only warrantied for one year. With typical smartphone use of (what I've witnessed) around 1.5 cycles per day, sometimes more, they will degrade quickly - not to mention overcharging through leaving devices plugged in overnight, and then all day at work, and then again...

 

If you're going to use a device for 20 months, I would honestly recommend purchasing a new battery at 12-16 months, if you're a moderate to heavy user.

 

Anyways, one big thing I've noticed is that, while devices will generally get around the same battery life with LTE vs 3G (signal strength concerns aside), people on LTE tend to use their devices much, much more. As these ARM devices are designed to spend most of their time asleep with the screen off, you will notice the battery life being considerably diminished with increased usage.

 

Another thing is, on Android, check to make sure you're not having some kind of wakelock issue. I have no idea if it's even possible for a wakelock to only occur on LTE, but it seem plausible. Samsung Touchwiz is prone to severe wakelock issues, above and beyond the normal Android problems and Facebook.

Anyone actually thinking about doing this, please consider the actual math.  Koi did some calculations, but forgot something: you still owe $27 * 12 when you end your service since you haven't paid off your last phone yet.  Alternatively you can NOT use your 12 month upgrade the last year, but then it's an unfair comparison since that cost is factored into the current way of upgrading every 12 months.

Oh come now, give me a little more credit I didn't forget, I intentionally left that out. My post assumed that you would be upgrading once a year on the year, and that you weren't leaving Sprint. Yes, if you wait longer than a year to upgrade, it becomes a hideously bad deal. Yes, if you're trying to cancel, you have to pay off the remaining balance. However - if you cancel service with 12 months left on a contract, you have to pay $240 in ETFs, so please don't forget that.

 

Of course, all of this discussion is a little silly in and of itself, as it assumes a stable market for used phones. Like I said at the end of my post on the matter, one advantage you can't put a price on is not having to deal with Craigslist/eBay. It's less time and energy that you personally have to spend.

 

If you're a smart consumer, you could use your last annual upgrade on a cheapo phone and cancel immediately. Example:

 

One year before you leave, you get an iPhone 8S (hypothetical here) for a 649.99 over 24 months, or $27/month. After one year, you want to cancel, so you suddenly owe $27*12 = $324. Ouch! But wait - there's that phone by ZTE over in the case. You decide to pick up one of those, and use your "annual upgrade" on your day of cancellation to get a $210 (+$36 activation fee) device. You just saved $78, plus however much you can sell it for. Or, since you're going elsewhere and we're assuming that phones aren't unlocked, you could just sell that 8S for $350 and be ahead $26.

I actually don't have anyone on my ignore list, so, eh. Nobody here has bothered me enough to do so. 

Sounds waves, just like electromagnetic waves, are subject to the inverse square law.  Plus, we have that whole non smooth, curved Earth thing going on.  Yeah, I really do not want to calculate the 125 Hz longitudinal wave path loss between here and Michigan.  Let us just say that it is massive -- something on the order of T-Mobile signal path loss.

 

 

AJ

Why not? Is the calculation... too hard for you? How loud would you have to yell for me to hear it? Loud enough to kill people around you?

No, I cannot effectively yell at you.  The path loss between Kansas and Michigan is too great.

 

AJ

Pfffft okay, I lost it here at work when I got the email reply to this. Thanks, AJ, everyone's looking at me weird. I'd explain it but... 

Anybody in GR near downtown having 4G data issues? I lost data about an hour ago. I'm still connected to 4G on my note 2 with full signal but i can't do any data. I flipped back to 3G and I have data. So not sure if it's my phone or the network.

PM me your phone number and the cross street you're at, I'll submit it to the network team. Grand Rapids has been having some odd issues lately, and I've been trying to use our Network Pinpoint tool as much as possible.

There is a third option.  Ignore the 600MHz auction and focus on the PCS H-Block auction.  Let T-Mo have the 600MHz frequency.   Focus on everything else you're cobbling together to make a new network rather than requiring a quad-band phone down the line to work on the full network.  

Previously, I would have said it's madness to not go after more low-frequency spectrum. However, with the announcement of building out spacing for 2500 in many metro areas, concentrating more in to PCS could definitely be a worthwhile thing.

 

Still, it would be a godsend for many rural areas - if it's that much better than 800 MHz. I'm waiting for AJ to chime in and yell at me about free space path loss.

I swear every time a new iOS release comes out there is something not getting along with the sprint network.

You're telling me. I had two (separate) absolutely bizarre cases today that both arose from having the wrong SIM in the phone.

 

The first, a brother and sister, both with iPhone 5's, had at some point in the past swapped SIMs (mistakenly), which upon the iOS 7 update, caused one phone to activate as the other, and the other to not activate at all and display "invalid SIM". Whoops.

 

The second, everything on the phone worked, but after the iOS 7 upgrade, iMessage showed a strange, invalid phone number as the phone's "phone number", despite the rest of the device showing his normal one. Quick SIM swap, he was on his way. After, of course, twenty minutes of me banging my head on the table wondering what in the world was wrong.

 

So much for the SIM only being used for LTE auth, eh? Of course, the people in both of these cases had no 4G (despite us being in a launched market), and just assumed there wasn't any...

Uh oh, Koi has not had decent Wi-Fi at home???  He is an impostor.  Round up the posse.

 

AJ

 

It's true, my home WiFi is terrible. I've been using my (6 GB capped) MiFi 500 on 3G lately, because it works better. I keep holding out for 800 LTE on DE34IP709...

Woah - that's pretty neat. It's definitely a cool idea; I've always liked what Republic was doing, it's just that the Motorola Defy (their only phone until now) is kinda... outdated and old. $300 for a Moto X is a great deal (considering it's $549.99 / $199.99 on Sprint), and hey, if you're on WiFi all the time, it should work great.

 

If I had decent WiFi at home (which I should, soon), I would consider switching to this. Well, once they get a tri-band device. You know.

So, perhaps ASU is an amalgamation of both RSSI/RSRP and SNR? So it's basically a copy of the "bars".

Something that hasn't been mentioned I don't think is that this a corporate store only program. Radio shack, best buy Wal-Mart, etc. And even Sprint preffered retailers can NOT do the ONE UP.Sent from my HTCONE using Tapatalk 4

while it's exceptionally unfortunate, I'm not at all surprised. Our buyback system works differently, and they'll want to make sure they get those phones back after that first year. I don't think there's currently a good way to hold dealers responsible for buyback being done at point of sale or not. Actually, I don't think they can at all. This is probably the same reason only corporate stores can do the Upgrade Now program, as it requires trading in your device.

 

Here's hoping that with Softbank at the helm, they get this sh*t straightened out.