bigsnake49

Let's turn this discussion somewhat around. Let's say you're on a congested sector. Would you rather your speedtest show you what you could be getting if the sector was not congested or what you're actually getting? Since they have DPI they could momentarily elevate your priority to trump everybody else's so that your speed test results do not screw up T-Mobile's average. Would you be OK with that?

According to your logic and others since my cable company offers a 150Mbps per second tier and since I am a cheap son of a bitch and I only pay for 30, they should show me the 150Mbps, since my speediest will lower their average unnecessarily. I hate DPI intensely.

When I do a speedtest on my cable connection it shows me my current speed, not the speed I could achieve if I was on the most expensive and speedier tier. It shows me what my speed is right now. T-Mobile should not get a free pass and they did not. False advertising!

T-Mobile admits throttled speed shenanigans and agrees to stop the practice. I guess if you were throttled and decided to do a speed test, the speed test would show your regular speed: http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/11/t-mobile-forced-to-stop-hiding-slow-speeds-from-throttled-customers/

According to the article: "The equipment used for the tests was based on Ericsson's commercially available 14B software release supporting the company's multi-standard RBS6000 ...". Now I have no idea when Sprint will test and deploy release 14B software. Additionally, I have no idea when the other 3 vendors will be releasing theirs. Isn't Ericsson out of the running for band 41 deployments for Sprint? Also, I am sure that the 450Mbps is for 3x20MHz FDD channels. It will be quite a bit less for 3x20MHz TDD channels.

Qualcomm and Ericsson completed interoperability of category 9 LTE equipment capable of handling up 450Mbs and up to three 20MHz channels. http://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/story/qualcomm-ericsson-complete-lte-category-9-interoperability-testing/2014-11-20 Now that's what I call speedy!

We can't get anything past you, AJ !

After 20 rounds it's up to $25.8B. Yes, somebody will have to pay. I presume AT&T/Verizon customers. Make that $27.2B.

So what does that tell us about Dish vs T-Mobile vs Sprint and the possibility of mergers between any of those players? Well, in an acquisition scenarios, Dish will be valued much higher after the auction, making it too expensive for either Sprint or T-Mobile. Even in a spectrum sale, the high price of this auction will preclude any spectrum sale. In a merger scenario, the spectrum price gets somewhat hidden because everybody has spectrum. However I can definitely see some movement to network share between all three after the 600MHz auction. I still see Dish acquiring the unpaired uplink for the reserve price and pairing it with the Lighsquared spectrum. Would the high proceeds beyond funding Firstnet encourage the FCC to move PS LMR out of the 800MHz SMR band and onto the nearby 700MHz PS voice band that's adjacent to the PS data band unifying it into a contiguous 15x15MHz band that can be used for both voice and data using VoLTE? One would hope that the FCC and PS community has the forethought to plan beyond the next year and see that the solution is an integrated voice/data communicator.

Molly Ringwald fed many a high schooler's wet dreams. She should be canonized just for that! $24B??? at the conclusion of bidding yesterday? I don't think that T-Mobile and Dish are in this auction anymore in any of the major markets. Maybe one of the 5MHz blocks?

Yeah, Catholics vs. Protestants in Northern Island. Mac vs PC. Windows vs Linux. T-Mobile vs Sprint. It will just attract trolls.

I would think that they NYC would be at the top of their CA strategy along with LA, San Fran, Dallas, Atlanta and other big cities. Like it should be.

He' talking about two places that have carrier aggregation and they are are working on 3 more places to deploy carrier aggregation. He's not talking about 2 channels + 3 channels.

T-Mobile has plenty of spectrum for the amount of subscribers they have. They could refarm PCS spectrum as well and so can everybody else.

Holy Molly, that's some serious money, right there!

The AWS-3 auction is going strong yielding $16.43B, far above the reserve price of $10.5B. There is rampant speculation that Dish is bidding only to drive up the price so that it's own spectrum holdings would go up in price. Contrary to my speculation pretty much nobody is bidding on the unpaired uplink spectrum. I thought that Dish would just pay the reserve price of approximately $0.5B and be done with it. Here's a link with some of the gory details: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/aws-3-auction-nets-14b-bids-so-far-dish-wild-card/2014-11-18 I know that Sprint is not participating, but it's still fun to speculate. There are some surprisingly interesting, intelligent comments at the bottom of the article.

I am really interested in seeing pCell in the real world. Can't wait for commercial scale deployments.

I agree. America Movil assets are for sale, same with Nextel Mexico.

OK technically 2 20x20 blocks.

There are deployment deadlines. I think 2016 is one of them.

Well one thing they can do is to turn both the 2000-2020MHz and 2180-2200 into downlinks and use both Lightsquared's 1626.5-1660.5MHz uplink and whatever other uplink they get from the AWS-3 auction to have a 40x40+ spectrum block.

Well, with all the hue and cry, Sprint manage to slightly increase their EBITDA margins in the 3rd quarter to almost 24%.

I know that most of you could not care less about Dish, but they have been in the news lately so here it goes. The first piece of news is that the fixed broadband trials with Sprint in Corpus Christi and with Ntelos are going very well and could turn into a real business. I think Sprint needs to exploit the wealth of EBS/BRS spectrum they have in the rural and exurban areas that are not served by the wired incumbents. http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/dish-execs-sprint-ntelos-fixed-td-lte-trials-could-turn-real-business/2014-11-05 The second piece of news is that Ergen is about to get control of Lightsquared, securing about 60% of the new company with J.P. Morgan getting 31.9%. Now, a lot of you have written Lightsquared off but I bet Charlie Ergen will do something about it. He just might sue the FCC and force them to give him compensatory spectrum or force them to force the GPS community to start putting steep filters on their receivers so that the spectrum that Lightsquared owns can be usable. I would not put it past him. He is very wily and persistent. I bet he goes after the unpaired blocks in the AWS-3 auction for the minimum. Between all of his spectrum holdings he will control quite a bit of spectrum. http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/dishs-ergen-would-get-control-lightsquared-latest-restructuring-deal/2014-11-04 Now granted, he does not have a network yet, but I am thinking Sprint will be happy to host some of his spectrum.

They were working with Dish and they were working with Sprint, or let me re-phrase they were working on 2.5GHz frequencies.

Maybe working with Artemis Networks?