bigsnake49

Do they plan to keep 3G going for longer than 2020? Or will they become LTE repeaters at some point?

I think both Comcast and Charter want to eventually offer cell service using CBRS and LAA spectrum in strand-mounted small cells and using Verizon for service outside their footprint. In Comcast's case they can even overlay their 600MHz spectrum in their coverage areas.

Oh everybody has the spectrum but when you are basically covering farmland does it make sense financially to have all 4 cover it? One farmhouse every 500 acres?

We don't need 4 carriers. It is wasteful to have 4 carriers covering the same sparsely populated areas that can barely support one carrier. I am all for them merging with USCC and partnering with Dish or the cable cos. Anything to create value.

I think it is very stupid that the Sprint/T-Mobile did not merge over control of the combined entity.

The board was epically wrong. They should have merged with not just Metro but Leap. Influx of 15M customers and strengthened midband spectrum. Just like they were epically wrong not to merge with Alltel.

Not to mention that the parent corp forgave $5B when Metro and T-Mobile merged.

I think that T-Mobile has plenty of 600Mhz spectrum.

It is valuable to somebody like Dish or Comcast that might want to beef up their presence in some of those markets.

Well, actually buying a company/companies with Metro fiber loops is preferable. Zayo comes to mind. Level 3 was just bought by Century link. The other solution is to partner with Cable cos. For example in addition to Verizon in Comcast's wireless MVNO, they could use Sprint and use Verizon only where Sprint does not have coverage. Something like Google is doing with Project Fi. Government should be the last resort. Although as part of infrastructure spending, I wish there was a government funded initiative to run fiber everywhere. Then a non-profit corporation would rent capacity on the network to all comers for a price just high enough to only maintain and expand the network.

They're just parroting what Consumers Reports study concluded.

Meanwhile, Sprint came last of the 4 carriers in customer satisfaction according to a Consumer Reports survey: http://bgr.com/2017/12/21/best-wireless-network-2017-sprint-vs-t-mobile-consumer-reports/

Too many companies do not pay taxes. I would like something like a VAT based on revenues rather than profits. No loopholes, no exemptions.

Sprint has not paid taxes in forever so there are probably not going to be affected by this bill for a little while.

Fixed 5G will not solve anything when the backhaul provider will charge you an arm and a leg and is the same provider whose ox you're goring by providing competition for his last mile fixed wired connection.

I have no problem paying more if it gets me more speed. Not that I have any choice. It's either Charter with 100Mbits/sec or AT&T with 25Mbits/sec.

No, I, as the consumer do not want to be charged twice, once for the connection and another time for streaming or consuming content by my ISP. The content provider pays for the connection on their end and I pay for mine. I also do not want my ISP to use paid lanes to favor certain content over others.

Yeah Charlie Ergen might have screwed Sprint in the past with driving up the price for Clearwire and then Sprint but sometimes you have to sit down and break bread with your former enemies. If the two of them want to offer ala carte wireless TV it would behoove both to cooperate. Sprint has the network assets and 2.5 spectrum and Dish has midband and low band spectrum and content. It will take a lot of spectrum to offer ala carte content starting and stopping at any time. Also require caching video servers "close" to the ultimate consumers. But it will also take either acquiring or partnering with a fiber rich company such as Zayo or Level 3 or even some cable cos. Didn't Level 3 just got acquired by Century Link?

Not to mention midband and 600Mhz spectrum. Then Sprint can take advantage of the combined assets to offer ala cart TV. Or they can partner with cable cos and together offer video to cord cutters.

Because Apple thinks that they're asking too much for their patents and that the patents are asking for a percentage of the phone price. The more expensive the phone even if that is due to more memory or bigger screen, the more money Qualcomm makes even though they don't have anything to do with the components that contribute to the additional cost. Qualcomm is mad because they lost out on the half of the LTE modems that Apple is sourcing from Intel and that Apple is not using their processors instead of building their own. As soon as Intel modems catch up to Qualcomm and include CDMA for Sprint/Verizon, I predict Apple will no longer use Qualcomm. It would not surprise me if after CDMA goes completely away Apple does not start making their own LTE/5G modems or acquire a company.

It depends. LAA is only going to be found in small cells probably implemented along with massive MIMO for high traffic areas. It will be a supplement to band 41. That's why Sprint is not chomping at the bit to implement it. Cable cos will probably implement it as strand mounted small cells and would have the upper hand since they don't need permits for those.

Sprint achieved 120-140MHz using just 5Mhz of 3.5GHz spectrum using LAA in conjunction with SpiderCloud. LAA is in Sprint's long term plans. https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/sprint-achieves-120-140-mbps-laa-deployment-spidercloud-says-laa-long-term-roadmap

The problem is that until Intel also implements the same features in their chipsets, Apple will not include them in their feature list even if Qualcomm did already. Plus Apple does not want to be the leading edge guinea pig.

I wonder how they're getting around the isolation/correlation problem at the low bands. Antenna design has totally changed since I took the class :).

Lots of compromises to achieve it. Are you sure that those are 4x2 low frequency antennas and not mid frequency?