milan03

That's up to you to figure out.

 

As I said earlier, if you believe that it's just not going to work without actually trying it, you'll never know.

This is what makes it most likely that CA is hard disabled.

Cool story.

 

I literally just walked into Sprint corp store, quickly navigated through ServiceMode on one of the floor S6 units, and went from CA-Disabled to CA-Not Configured (at the site). Took me less than 30 seconds.

 

 

 

So much for that hardware disabled spiel.

I have Verizon variant, but got the standby time right where I like it. 

 

Few notable tweaks:

- Locations set at GPS only

- WiFi while sleep only when plugged in.

- Removed the bloat, etc.

 

It's likely a modem level disable. Back before the Nexus 5 received its Spark update it was possible to get into the engineering menu and "enable" band 41/26, but it didn't do anything. Band 41/26 remained disabled until the modem firmware was updated.

Samsung Galaxy UEs with TouchWiz framework have very little to do with AOSP, but I guess we can go on about why it's just not gonna work without even trying.

 

If someone with Note Edge or GS6/Edge actually wants to give this a shot, feel free to PM me.

*firmware

 

Straight from engineering documents here. That's what they say. No devices will have CA enabled until they push it out to all devices when ready.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5

All operators will always say the same thing, it's their corporate spiel. They simply don't expect average user to know how to dial into the Engineering Mode, and then navigate and enable CA.

 

But we've been able to do just that many times before on Samsung devices from multiple operators, don't see why it wouldn't work on Sprint's devices. Of course, unless someone actually tried the method and failed.

 

Let me know if I should just stop talking 

hardware level disable. They will have to push an update out. People cannot manually enable it.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5

You mean firmware. Has anyone even given ServiceMode a serious shot here?

CA can typically be enabled on Samsung Galaxy devices by navigating the ServiceMode.

Would this result in anything other than "2" being displayed on an iPhone 6 under transmission antennas?

 

 

Sent from my iPhone 6

According to SGR, they're not using 4x2 configuration on their 8T8R sites at all so it will still say "2" on iPhone.

Samsung devices with Qualcomm chipset typically display TM in AS INFORMATION.

 

Apparently they have 4x2 MIMO active on a few legacy Sprint (non Clearwire) undisclosed sites.

Fit areas. CA is not enabled for subscribers.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5

I'd say it's worth checking it out. That transmission mode 8 should still provide a nice improvement in median throughput when in low mobility, low multipath and LOS environment.

Just the heads up, Rockford and Elmhurst, IL have been identified and confirmed as Carrier Aggregation areas, all with 8T8R and Beamforming (TM8) according to SRG.

 

If you have a capable CA device and are willing to drive there, it may be worth checking this out.

No carrier without fallback and or release 10 upgrades can deploy VoLTE, regardless.

VoLTE is not defined in Release 10 specification, so there isn't a direct correlation between the two, especially for 3GPP2 operators that don't even have access to Release 10 fallback mechanism like eSRVCC.

 

Operators absolutely can rollout VoLTE without Release 10, Verizon being a prime example.

I'd be very surprised if Verizon developed an LTE Femtocell. Verizon's going to launch WiFi calling and say how great it is even though T-Mobile and Sprint have offered it for quite some time.... except in the case of iPhones which is recent for T-Mobile, and even more recent for Sprint.

Let's just clarify WiFi Calling in the U.S. market place.

 

T-Mobile's WiFi Calling is the Next Generation VoWiFi defined in Release 12 with IP address preservation between Cellular (VoLTE) and WiFi bearers, providing an opportunity for operators to seamlessly extend their voice applications between two different environments, while fully leveraging AMR-WB or HD Voice. It requires modifying the edge of the IMS core by adding ePDG.

 

Since Verizon has nationwide VoLTE I'm guessing that's what they're in the process of doing as well, but there hasn't been solid confirmation so far.

 

Sprint's WiFi calling is an older implementation without call continuity and other IMS features.

Sprint's history and T-Mobile's history are the same length in New York City.  The difference is that Omnipoint had very few markets -- while Sprint already had acquired most of its nationwide footprint.  So, Omnipoint could or even had to concentrate more on its New York MTA market.  How much difference that should make 20 years later, though, is up for debate.

 

AJ

Man, I still have my Omnipoint Ericsson cell phone from 1997 somewhere... 

 

Well T-Mobile had to divest some of their PCS spectrum to Cingular more than a decade ago, which made them get serious and building insane amounts of sites in order to survive and stay competitive. They were in a very tough situation here.

AWS-1 auction gave them something to work with, but it's really more than a decade of building that cell grid, and now having the densest network is their crown jewel. 

And MetroPCS brought in even more density with their outdoor DAS nodes, so that's coming soon...

I wouldn't call NYC T-Mobile's flagship market. They only have 15x15 AWS LTE and can't deploy 700MHz yet because of interference issues. The only thing they can really showcase in NYC is super tight site spacing.

20MHz FDD LTE in NYC within the next few months. One HSPA+42 carrier is getting refarmed.

 

They are really proud of NYC network, as they can provide lots of capacity through the combination of Wideband and that cell density. This is why it's one of their flagship markets.

Plenty of areas in the Catskills and Taconics or even along the Hudson in downstate New York are not far from large population centers, but they could be considered "rural."

 

AJ

It could, but then again, that area is also largely considered as Upstate NY.

Could've also been easier to just say AT&T is amazing in Westchester, Putnam, etc so that we can relate. 

I had not heard before being accused of "Fabian tactics" construed as a "personal attack."  But that is a pretty good one -- on both ends.  I guess some people do not want to be associated with Fabian Cortez.

 

Now, everyone, back on track.  Thanks...

 

AJ

Yeah I also enjoyed the elusive "rural Downstate NY" part... 

My location is not absent from my profile. You're also putting words in my mouth. I never said I had a negative experience with Sprint, so stop with the Fabian tactics. 

 

Oh... let's not go there. I'm pretty sure personal attacks aren't tolerated here.

 

I'll just let the mods deal with this.

I'm normally don't entertain trolling, but I'll reiterate that I'm in a non-urban area, which in my case is a mix of suburbia and rural.

How's your negative (Sprint/T-Mobile/Verizon) anecdotal experience in which you're not even willing to share the general geographical area of coverage going to help any one of us relate or discuss? 

I'd say "maintaining" is even getting to be a stretch. With the reports from RootMetrics coming in, it sounds like a lot of places need updating. Even Robert has mentioned there are numerous sub-par areas.

Hardly maintaining, as their data performance has been dropping, still no VoLTE or Carrier Aggregation rolled out in a meaningful number of Top markets. It's been a very sloppy job.

 

It seems to me that they've lost their focus and shifted resources and investment into Mexico, DTV, and small things that don't require almost any infrastructure investment like IoT (50¢ connected cars, homes, etc). That's where their "growth" comes from.

 

They've not been making their wireless subscribers happy in a long, long time, dropping a few hundred thousand prime postpaid phone subs for several quarters in a row.

Sprint and TMO are in a game of chicken; neither wants to be first to abandon unlimited.

Sprint has more spectrum to burn than TMO and certainly not goodwill to sacrifice so TMO will be first to blink.

 

And that's when I'll take my future universal iphone to sprint.

Since Unlimited Data is guaranteed on T-Mobile for at least another 2years (UnCarrier 9), you better start stashing that money for that iPhone 8 in 2017.

Well this clears out the "throttling" part.

 

 

What do you call the problem on T-Mobile where you get like 0.01 to 0.10 megabits down/up and occasionally give or take 1 megabit? All with a good signal, outdoors (for this example), good ping, but not throttled/over your limit? DSL backhaul  ?

 

But really, I saw it a million times when I tried them. The towers were not under load (if under any load at all because no one in my area uses T-Mobile). Only a couple areas had "functional" HSPA+ (even though practically all their coverage was marked as LTE, 95% of it wasn't). 3 pm or 3 am; wouldn't matter. 

 

Ironically the one area I'd get good HSPA+ speeds from had like two outages over the 2 months I used T-Mobile for 1-2 days at a time. 

 

I'd love to know which area of NYC was this, and how many months/years ago did you experience this? I'll be willing to test it out myself.

 

That behavior is nothing like what I've been seeing in NYC as all sites have 40Mbps max rate set on LTE sectors, and that's at the very minimum. Most of them are at 80Mbps.

 

It doesn't make very much sense, especially since you're saying that the latency stayed low.

B41 is now / or going to be set as priority band in all cases and all devices will hand off to band 41 where available. 

Changing Qhyst value (and a few more) at the cell site, operators can easily steer the traffic onto the desired band. For instance, if Sprint UE reads RSRP better than "x"dBm on Band 41 layer, Band 41 will be used regardless of RSRP values on B25/26. 

 

Verizon's been doing this over the past 18months, typically having -110dBm as the cut off value for AWS. When the signal drops below -110dBm on the AWS layer, UE fallback to Band 13.

Sure

Thanks again! It looks quite different than on Shannon 333 based S6: http://i.imgur.com/SvEALjN.png

 

This looks like it could be a perfect device for discovering sites with Carrier Aggregation enabled. Especially for Chicago users!

 

But the weirdest part is that according to your screenshot Sprint is shipping these devices with CA disabled. Not sure what's the reason behind this, but that could typically be enabled once the user has root access.

Just 0011

Thanks! Mind posting a screenshot when you get a chance?