bigsnake49

That's totally pedantic. They are comparing preorder sales between this year and last. iPhone 7, 7+ to iPhone 6s, 6s+.

How much do TV stations in the 600MHz band make per year? Most of them actually will be repacked in lower bands so they are not going to lose their allocation. The millennials don't watch TV, either OTA or cable or satellite. So why the hell are we paying the OTA spectrum holders? Can somebody tell me?

iPhone7 also does not support Band 66 (AWS-1, AWS-3 and Dish's spectrum). Maybe some of the Android phones might include it. Otherwise T-Mobile has to wait until September 2017, early 2018 before it see any benefits from it.

If you are in the gap between two sectors, sometimes it gets real bad. In my old house I was right in the gap, less than half a mile from the site. Two blocks down, perfect signal. Two blocks up, the same. At my location maybe 2 ticks of signal. Inside the house just one. It did not help that the house was constructed out of cement block. Verizon perfect signal, AT&T also, T-mobile, crap. All of them on the same tower. All of them on PCS.

Higher QAM is only applicable close to the site. At the edge it'll be 16QAM, with 64QAM in the middle and 256QAM close. Both the site and the UE have to support it.

It depends what you're doing with your phone. If you're talking on the phone, CA does not increase your coverage. If you're uploading pics then it will not increase your coverage. But if you're downloading, then CA will increase your effective coverage since you will have decent download performance at the cells edge and beyond.

Are you talking about coverage outside or inside? All bets are off when we are talking about coverage indoors from a macro site.

In order to each the same radius as a B25 site, you need the 8t8r panels.

the 8tx8r antennas are supposed to have both transmit and receive diversity. That in conjunction with beam forming allows B41 to expand its coverage area farther than is possible with simpler antenna panels.

I doubt you'd be able to tell the difference between 4K and 1080p. Plus I don't see a hell of a lot of 4K video available out there. Don't say Netflix because their 4K looks as good as good as Apple's 1080p.

I have not seen a crowded Sprint rack ever. Now AT&T racks on the other hand...

You don't remove it. You keep the cabinets and move the RRH's and antennas to Sprint's or T-Mobile's rack. Both have plenty of space on them. Eventually you might need new cards.

There will be no conflicting tech. It will all be LTE and VOLTE. CDMA will be phased out and so will WCDMA. They will have to shed some of their spectrum holdings or not (depending on 5G allocations and or Dish spectrum being sold to Verizon and/or AT&T). But the avoided capex will be tremendous, same with opex. They won't have to get all new panels and cabinets, they will just be moved/merged to either Sprint's or T-Mobile's sites.

First they need to actually reband the spectrum so that it's contiguous. Then we will see. Again deployment costs are going to eat them up unless they deploy an innovative architecture to minimize them. A company called Spark already offers a cellular plan for $3/month for 1MB which is enough for 20,000 messages of 50 bytes or less. Each additional MB costs $1: http://www.techhive.com/article/2889923/spark-electron-brings-cheap-cellular-connectivity-to-the-internet-of-things.html For meter reading/control, that's plenty of data. I still think that already existing carriers have a built in advantage, since the deployment costs are already sunk. Same thing with FirstNet. Now if Sprint had their shit together they would have come to some agreement withe the other spectrum holders in that band and added the band to its supported bands and used it for M2M/IoT.

Please keep them out of Arstechnica!

First of all, Sprint is not going to be buying anybody. They're up to their neck in debt and they can't use stock since their stock has been in the dumps. SoftBank is also starting to run out of money/borrowing ability. So Sprint is in line to be acquired not acquire anybody. Maybe T-Mobile can acquire them.

Unless they can either piggyback off somebody else's infrastructure (i.e., Sprint's) or can reduce the number of towers required per covered area by turning up signal strength/and or beam forming) They will be swallowed by deployment costs. The utilities do not want to be paying a lot of money per meter for meter reading. Utilities can piggy back on FirstNet and basically help defray operating costs. The feds are underwriting deployment costs.

I think that Son bought Sprint with the express purpose of merging with T-Mobile and provide a strong alternative to the Big 2. Since T-Mobile already had a pretty well developed LTE network, capex would be lower since Sprint's frequencies could be added to T-Mobile's sites at a fraction of the cost to upgrade Sprint's network. Unfortunately it did not happen according to plan. SoftBank is not investing in Sprint anymore and I personally think it is grooming it for sale. Cut costs, make it profitable show some additions and then let it become somebody else's problem. Sprint just needs to grow organically since SoftBank is not investing in it. Who knows, maybe that will make it more entrepreneurial and nimble, able to execute. One thing that Sprint needs to do is finance its debt at a much lower interest rate. It is really dragging them down.

What I would like to see more than anything else even more so than postpaid gains is the cost/MB come down to industry levels and the operating margins, again around industry margins.

Comcast is taking concrete steps to become a Verizon MVNO. They are probably counting on WiFi first strategy. But they are also participating in the 600MHz auction. What's their long term wireless play? Create the 5th national carrier? Team up with Dish for midband? Buy either T-Mobile or Sprint?

I was hoping that SoftBank would actually put some money in Sprint but so far Sprint is being self financed, as in debt financed. Oh well, they need to tighten their belts, which means that they have to let some people go in KC (sorry AJ), become efficient and enterpreunial and fight hard for every customer. Not to mention execute on the network side where they have failed miserably.

I am sure that Verizon has some gaps on I-10. AT&T had a 150 mile gap on I-10. T-Mobile and Sprint only cover the towns and they do a very good job. Nobody but nobody covers more square miles than Verizon. That's why I always carry a spare Verizon CDMA non-data phone in my glove compartment. I wonder what I will have to do when they cut CDMA off in 2019 or 2020. I guess go for the cheapest Verizon MVNO for my spare?

When T-Mobile starts covering square miles instead of POPS come back and talk to me. When they start covering I-10 in the middle of nowhere, West Texas or NM or AZ come and talk to me. When they start covering I-80 in the salt flats of Utah and the sagebrush of Wyoming come and talk to me. Until then Verizon is coverage king.

Once they started doing the two for one deal on the Samsungs that pretty much killed the resale value.

The resale value of a Samsung is not as high as an iPhone. They were probably losing money on them.