xenadu

Since this comes up on a google search, I wanted to clarify that my post was incorrect - this isn't proof of anything!

old, incorrect post:

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If this link is to believed http://www.appleinsi...ilter_tech.html

That sure looks like band class 5 which, unless I am mistaken, is the SMR band Sprint owns. Band 2 is 1900mhz, 13/17 is the 700mhz, 4 is AWS, and 8 is the traditional upper 800 cellular A/B.

It would appear Apple has found a way to cram all that support into a single device. Apparently the newer FBAR filters are good enough to allow it

Edit: I suspect this was part of the deal Sprint signed with Apple to make it worth supporting that band. Without a firm commit to sell a lot of iPhones, it wouldn't be worth it.

It is just frustrating to go a two miles down the road to the grocery store and have 1.5Mbps-2.0Mbps download speeds then come home and be lucky to hit 100Kbps. So close!

Yeah, for sure. Now if they could figure out how to hack the baseband on the 4S so we can switch from CDMA to GSM at will.

This is a lack of test rigs and nothing else. The embedded stuff is almost universally crap software and no doubt full of exploitable holes.... You just need expensive test and dev rigs to really dig into it without bricking devices.

Almost everything that has software written by hardware engineers is a complete piece of shit and that is not a joke. You wouldn't believe the number of security holes in critical pieces of infrastructure.

This will be entirely driven on whether or not the QualComm 22nm LTE chipset supports it or not. Apple, QualComm, and everyone else is well aware that phones will need to support many bands going forward and that there are increasingly strong pressures to keep the devices universal.

From QualComm's end the hardware will talk in the 800mhz band but the software on the chip will need to support the different frequency sets between the 800 and SMR frequencies. Assuming that is the case the same antenna should work for both. It would seem crazy to me to only support voice in that band when a few software tweaks should enable LTE but who knows.

If it doesn't support it, expect Sprint to push hard to offload all non-iPhone traffic to 800 SMR to make room for iPhones at 1900... However given that the 4 and 4S should fit the free and cheap slots in the lineup Sprint will be keeping EVDO around for some time. Obviously there will be at least one EVDO carrier for years and years, but I figure they'll have to keep an even mix of it and LTE for longer than we would like.

I always figured that with the iPhone stemming subscriber losses and NV fixing the network (and enabling them to keep Unlimited data), they would be in a much better financial position in 2014 and begin rolling out expansions at that time, or possibly delaying until 2015.

They were perusing vendor financing and other debt deals to keep their existing credit lines and cash flow available if possible. IMHO this should give them added flexibility to deal with unexpected charges or even do an acquisition if the timing is right since they won't have all their cash stuck in NV.

What is this gruff about parts of 700mhz not being compatible with the same antenna, amps, etc? That doesn't sound right to me. Sure, it might not be quite as efficient outside its designed band but there is no way it drops off that fast.

The rest of it makes sense though.

It was a move designed to pad executive pocketbooks by "doing something". There was no reason to sell off ILEC, backhaul, etc. Looks about as smart as the decision of TI to sell its defense department right before silicon crashed and almost bankrupted the company... Instead of letting defense keep them afloat through the dark times.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/fcc-to-verizon-whats-wrong-with-that-spectrum-you-never-built-out/

There must be a good reason to sell prime 700MHz spectrum to exchange for the less useful AWS Verizon wants to buy, but I have no idea what that reason is.

FYI: you are incorrect about FIOS in Plano. All of Plano has FIOS, as does Allen. Verizon is doing overbuilds here in Collin County at least, so there are areas in Allen, McKinney, and Plano where you have a choice of AT&T or Verizon. It really sucks that the new Verizon CEO is only concerned about pumping the stock price... As a result they've stopped investing in new FIOS deployments. Of course that was always how AT&T wanted to work - which is why Dallas, their home turf, still has nothing but DSL. In the few fiber UVerse areas you still have bandwidth caps so I guess it doesn't matter. Im just waiting for the new Verizon CEO to implement caps on FIOS, even though it's an all fiber network with a massive backbone that can't possibly suffer congestion.

Major, major fiber runs all along US 75 and PGBT so at least in backhaul terms that can't explain why things are moving so slowly up here. In fact AT&T has somewhat reasonable prices on gigabit MAN setups, plus I believe Sprint and Verizon both have fiber running this path too. It must be what Robert said - contracted out to a third party who is taking their time.

Still no love around here, 1 bar and dropped calls. I've mapped out my living room, which parts I am guaranteed to have a dropped call in and which parts might succeed. Also you can't break the 100kbps barrier during the day anymore. I just managed to hit 300kbps at midnight and that's spectacular.

Only if they sense that carrier lockdowns and/or caps put bottlenecks on their future growth. Same reason Google is toying with fiber deployments... More to scare the carriers than anything.

People who think the iPad 3 isnt much have never used one. I bought one (mostly because the wife wanted an iPad so I handed down my iPad 2). I didn't think the upgrade was worth much but after using this new screen I will never go back to a low resolution device. My eyes just can't take it.

I think the mods should start handing down warnings/bans for posts like the early ones in this thread, useless noise like "iSheep" or whatever. OK, we get it - you don't like Apple. The most important thing to you is the bragging-specs so you can out e-peen your buddies. Fine, I have no problem with that. Please go right ahead. Personally, I care about the apps and what my device can do for me. But if Apple is wrong then I pray that I can be that wrong some day... 100 billion dollars wrong. The point is that kind of drivel just lowers the signal to noise ratio of these forums.

Apple is still selling every single device they make, unlike most of the Android tablets that were channel-stuffed then dumped at a loss. How long can that go on? Nevertheless, I wouldn't wish failure on them! We all win when manufacturers compete for our business.

I just found this on Sprints site this morning. Have they advertised the iPhone 4 this way before?

 

 

This is just weird to me.

Not odd if Apple is going to announce the new iPhone at WWDC, which is just a few weeks away now. However I think it is just a generic marketing blurb, because IMHO Apple will keep the 4 around as the basic "free" handset.

Man, I guess I am one of the lucky ones when it comes to home internet. My Uverse gets me a consistent 11 down, 2 up. When I had comcast I never got below 15 down.

Wow. I feel sorry for people not in a FIOS area. They offer 150Mbit service here.

They said 40% of those iPhone customers were new to Sprint. That's great news... If Sprint can get the network tip-top they should be able to hammer AT&T and VZW in advertising over the unlimited data issue and steal a lot of customers.

The idea that iOS is even half as fragmented as Android is laughable, please don't spread lies. Right now, today, I build my iOS apps for v4.2 up to latest from the same code base and only one or two version-specific things for hardware support. It is trivially easy and as a result even people with an iPhone 3G can buy my app. I have one screen size and form factor to test for. I only have to test in two simulators and I know it will work on all the devices. Not to mention people with an iPhone 3GS can upgrade to iOS 5 latest. How many 3 year old Android phones will be running ICS? (hint: practically none)

iOS has the advantage on apps because that's where the money is. Android users (as a whole) just don't buy as many apps, which is not surprising considering most Android phones are the $49 or free models carriers give away. A lot of people end up with those phones because no one is using/selling feature phones anymore.

Let's also not forget that only with the release of the iPhone 4S has Apple had a free iPhone in the 3GS. When the iPhone 5 comes out it will push the iPhone 4 to free with contract which makes it available to Verizon and Sprint.

Don't get me wrong - I have no desire to see Android go away. I think it keeps Apple on their toes.

Why? Apple does way better than almost every other manufacturer. They pay better and treat their workers better /because/ they are the 800lb gorilla and can force the supply chain to comply.

If we wanted to have more state involvement in the economy and risk tons of debt financing capital construction and handing out free educations to all US citizens we could compete with China at this scale. The difference per iPhone seems to range from 20-60 bucks depending on who you believe. The problem is no one will front the capital on a speculative bet that you will win the contract and educating engineers/managers to be ready just in case. The Bank of China will. Simple as that.

Yeah I write software and buffer size calculations are powers of 2. This makes sense when you realize there is usually a huge performance hit for "unaligned" memory access (hitting odd memory addresses not even multiples of the appropriate power of 2, eg: 4 bytes or 32 bits on a 32 bit system). So a 16K memory buffer should be 16 * 1024, not 16000.

The powers of 10 thing was invented by HDD manufacturers. I'm sorry to see others copying it. There has been a push to differentiate by using Xib suffixes to denote powers of two, eg 2MiB but so far hasn't caught on.

 

 

1Mbps is not equal to 2^20 bits/sec. They use powers of two in reference to memory and cpu addressing. Network speeds and storage (i.e. Hard drives and such) use powers of 10. See table on top right here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix.

No, only hard drives use powers of 10. Network transfer speeds are definitely powers of 2.

Actually, to further clarify, bits are the basic unit of measurement for data. They are the 1s and 0s that build the data we see. A byte, on the other hand, refers to the amount of bits required to encode a single character of text. Currently, this is generally accepted as 8 bits, but it has varied in the past.

This is why bytes are more suitable for referring to storage capacity, where bits are more suitable for referring to digital information transfer. Your internet connection will only deliver so many 1s and 0s, no matter how your computer uses them to put together the transmitted data.

 

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

Warning: Nerd content ahead!

8-bits do make up a byte but that does not mean it is the storage space for a single character. Unicode separated the concept of "code points" (the visual symbols we think of as letters, numbers, etc) from the encoding (the format used to store them). These days a lot of stuff is UTF-8 which uses 1 byte for US English characters and from 2-4 bytes for others. UTF-16 uses 2 bytes for most code points in the most common languages with the benefit that it typically doesn't vary so you can jump forward in a string without having to examine all the bytes in between.

Not to mention for network transfers, you have overhead that makes your effective transfer speeds lower because not all the bits are used for your content.

Anyway for historical reasons network transfer speeds are often quoted in bits per second, so 1Mbps is 1024*1024 bits per second. Divide by 8 to get the MB/s. Oh yeah I forgot to mention that bits/bytes are usually measured in multiples of 1024 because in binary 1024 is a direct power of 2 (equivalent to 1000 being a direct power of 10, which is why we insider it to be a "round" number.... Similarly computer systems often stick to "round" numbers only in base 2).

My guess is 4.5" screen and they introduce an iPhone mini with the existing 3.5" screen.

Considering they are down to under 5 million postpaid iDEN subscribers... there isn't a lot left to lose but you are probably correct. You will likely continue to see losses on the iDEN side and I would guess see gains on the CDMA side (thanks to the iPhone).

This is my thinking as well... And probably why they are announcing iDEN's shutdown now. Might as well start closing towers and reallocating spectrum to cut the network costs and improve your CDMA network. People who are going to stay will stay and the rest will jump ship anyway, no sense in prolonging it.

I haven't had too many issues with it but I did upgrade to the latest version so that might be part of it. I am annoyed at Apple for not supporting older hardware on Lion but I understand why (Lion is 64-bit only). It means my old MacBook my wife uses can't be upgraded so iPhoto still does run like a dog on that machine. That's the blessing and curse of Apple - by being willing to ditch backwards compatibility when required, they don't get hamstrung by bad decisions from 10 years ago (unlike Microsoft who bends over backwards to keep Windows compatible but that causes huge security issues and lets developers get away with being idiots instead of fixing their code). It's both a blessing and a curse at times.

Re: Android - If it works for you great - keep using it and I am happy for you. Android doesnt fit my needs. I just don't see the point in people who have no desire to use Apple products coming into the Apple-specific subforum to tell us Apple users how stupid, iSheep, ignorant, or whatever we are. Or look down on us because you are clearly too clever to fall for Apple's marketing (and pat yourselves on the back). Why do you care?

I don't care that Android copied a lot of features from iOS. I don't care that Apple has copied features from others. I hope both continue to do well so it will keep Apple on their toes and improving its mobile ecosystem. That's a net win for everyone.

I believe Sprint is gaining post-paid on the Sprint side but losing them on the Nextel side. IIRC they said to expect that trend to continue but it will be more than made up for by the cost savings of shutting down iDEN. Not sure how true that is but I guess we will see.