Let's keep politics out of this thread!!!
Softbank Mulling Sprint / DISH Combo
- Thread starter Scott Greczkowski
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Profit is one thing - cash flow is quite another.
No doubt analysts are also looking at customer acquisition costs, churn, ARPU and projected capital expenditures.
Sprint certainly has a bad reputation. And I believe they were the first cell company to lose customers, which they did for a few years.
Maybe they're turning it around. I don't know. I might move to T-Mobile, but I sure wouldn't move to Sprint. My memories of poor Nextel service, and the guys wanting to play GI Joe with PTT, are too strong.
No doubt analysts are also looking at customer acquisition costs, churn, ARPU and projected capital expenditures.
Sprint certainly has a bad reputation. And I believe they were the first cell company to lose customers, which they did for a few years.
Maybe they're turning it around. I don't know. I might move to T-Mobile, but I sure wouldn't move to Sprint. My memories of poor Nextel service, and the guys wanting to play GI Joe with PTT, are too strong.
The problem with zoomed out maps like that is, just that, they are zoomed out.
If you took that map and put a pin point where I work, you'd be in the red with no service. When in reality this is what I see
Never took a look at Open Signal before but I used a similar crowd sourced application from a similar company where you could go street level, I think it began with an S and the used the color purple with different intensities to show the strength. That's how I knew what towers Sprint lit up with LTE when they were testing, prior to them showing as upgraded on network.sprint.com And that is ultimately why I let Verizon, paid a massive ETF on two lines to go back with Sprint. Never will on spend another penny with Verizon.
Handsets also make a difference. At work we only have iPhones for company issued phones. Used to have AT&T and Verizon up until last year, now we have Sprint and T-Mobile. Across all four carries iPhones always have had the poorest signal and slowest speed. And I don't look at bars/dots, I bring up the Field Test screen on the iPhone and compare using the numerical dbm value. From what I've seen Motorola phones have the strongest antennas. When we had AT&T, those that have personal Android phones (mainly Samsung) on AT&T could get a very poor, but mostly usable signal on AT&T, whereas their company issued iPhone showed No Service when anywhere on the property.
Nokia is supposedly the best when it comes to reception followed by Motorola as Motorola didn't have internal antennas until later on. As for iPhone, I thought the 6/6s's were supposed to have good RF performance.
From the dialer, you can see the eng screens by typing this:
*3001#12345#*
Many Samsung phones have their "Enginerring" screen
Mostly Android uses ##DATA# from phone dialer, or ##DEBUG#,
I always use ##SCRTN# when I have any type of reception issues...
I did an experiment this morning for the benefit of this thread.
I have a Verizon Iphone 7 Plus. A coworker in my office has a Sprint Iphone 7 Plus. The Sprint and Verizon cells are both on the same tower within a 4 mile radius of the building.
As the attached photo shows, my phone receives a "two bar" LTE signal from that tower, while the Sprint equivalent shows a "two bar" signal with 1xRTT CDMA. We toggled Airplane Mode on her phone several times and the result was the same.
What this reiterates to me is that Sprint's signal penetration in buildings is still poor. Nothing has improved at our location, and we are in a very large suburb of Kansas City.
PS- You'll see the Satelliteguys log in link on my main screen
I have a Verizon Iphone 7 Plus. A coworker in my office has a Sprint Iphone 7 Plus. The Sprint and Verizon cells are both on the same tower within a 4 mile radius of the building.
As the attached photo shows, my phone receives a "two bar" LTE signal from that tower, while the Sprint equivalent shows a "two bar" signal with 1xRTT CDMA. We toggled Airplane Mode on her phone several times and the result was the same.
What this reiterates to me is that Sprint's signal penetration in buildings is still poor. Nothing has improved at our location, and we are in a very large suburb of Kansas City.
PS- You'll see the Satelliteguys log in link on my main screen
They could have the fastest speed in the whole world and it wouldn't matter if you can't receive their signal
So it's a repeater, like the one Tmobile uses. Again, you have to have at least 1 bar of reliable signal to make a repeater work. Garbage in, garbage out. There's nothing "magical" about a repeater.
I don't usually step outside of the OTA or FTA forums, but saw this thread and decided to give it a look. Let's see if I can cut through the nonsense a bit.
Full disclosure, I'm a Sprint customer for my primary line and an S4GRU staff member, a SatelliteGuys staff member, and as flagged in my signature, an FCC employee. I have cell phones for all five carriers (US Cellular being #5). Use whichever grains of salt you wish, but I'm also not interested in getting into a debate, so I may or may not choose to respond to any replies to this message. Just trying to provide information and clarity.
First, to some specific messages that caught my eye.
If you're in San Francisco, all the cell tower locations are public. The city makes them available.
Google Fusion Tables
How is it any different from paying $650 in termination fees if someone switches, as other carriers do? They're requiring customers bring their own device, meaning Sprint doesn't have to pay it off. If Sprint is charging $50/month for unlimited, over a year, that's $600. Basically the same amount, just not all paid up-front, with the added bonus of being able to say "free service!" Seems pretty smart to me.
A few larger subjects that caught my eye:
1) Antenna Search is a useful tool, but it's not a panacea. Outside of the state of Connecticut and a few municipalities such as San Francisco, noted above, there is no requirement that cell site locations be made public. Additionally, most cell companies do not own their own towers anymore, which makes identifying them from Antenna Search much more difficult. Some of the filings represent things that never got built. You may be able to find microwave links for those carriers on individual towers, particularly in rural areas, as well as older CLR licenses that indicated specific locations which haven't been updated in a decade or so, but that will definitely miss a lot.
That being said, I keep a private map of cell towers in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and other areas I frequent or are near where I may go at some point (I'm up to like 9,340 unique antenna structures or so). It's actually pretty straight-forward to track down the cell tower locations in many cases, particularly if you are in the area in question and have an Android phone with the right software. If your local building permitting office has their records online, you may have more luck looking there; in my county, they list the carrier involved on each permit filing on the public system, which makes tracking them very easy. Additionally, the official Sprint and T-Mobile maps, in less dense areas, are pretty good at narrowing down specific locations.
2) Comparing maps is a fruitless exercise. The maps of the carriers are not directly comparable. Verizon and AT&T greatly exaggerate their LTE maps, while T-Mobile is better but still shows "extended" LTE out to sometimes-ridiculous distances. Sprint's map looks the thinnest, but it's also the most honest of the four. Yes, they have holes, but so do the others. As noted by others here, if you don't like Sprint, don't use it. That's what competition is for.
As far as Open Signal and similar services are concerned, you have sampling bias. Verizon and AT&T have many more customers, as someone else noted, so it's easier to get a better sampling of customers. Further, unhappy customers are more likely to use speed tests or mapping services. There's also the question of the performance of individual devices, what bands and other enhancements those devices support, etc. A Sprint phone with HPUE (High-Power User Equipment) will have a different level of service than one without it, for example. A T-Mobile phone that doesn't support Band 12 will have bigger holes in coverage than one that does.
3) Sprint definitely made some questionable to outright poor decisions in the past. The Nextel purchase was a boondoggle, the WiMax deployment was a dead end, and the company is swimming in debt. Their original Band 41 deployment strategy likely wasted a lot of money. Their service has left something to be desired.
All of that said, Sprint has improved drastically. The Nextel purchase has actually worked out in their favor over the long term by giving them nearly-nationwide spectrum on 800 MHz for coverage (Band 26). The Band 41 deployment strategy has been retooled to be much cheaper and Sprint is back on track with deployment of that spectrum. Marcelo has done a great job getting the company as a whole back on track.
I've been a customer since 2014, when I got tired of using Verizon's aging 3G network via US Cellular roaming and switched away. Since that time, in my area, Sprint has turned on Band 25 second carrier and two or three carriers of Band 41 on most sites, having already been running Band 25 and 26 back then. They've added sites to fill in some of the bigger holes, and have applications on file to install small cells to fill the smaller holes, including some very near to where I live. I'm a Sprint customer because Sprint has roaming agreements with other carriers, specifically US Cellular (only carrier where my parents live, but no native service where I live), and Sprint now supports LTE roaming on those networks when out of the Sprint service area. Do I still encounter places where my other phones have service and Sprint does not? Sure. I also encounter the opposite. I have selected the service that best meets my needs at this time, and that is Sprint. If someone overbuilds where US Cellular is the only provider, I may opt to switch to that carrier instead.
4) The Magic Box is a good thing, and needing one to get inside a building is not a sign of a bad network. If you'll check, none of the carriers guarantee service inside buildings, and in fact many people connect to Wi-Fi in their homes for exactly that reason. The Magic Box is being provided to those who want it free of charge and it does not connect to your home network--it's a more advanced signal booster for the network that doesn't require you paying for separate service to help Sprint out. I won't be surprised to see other carriers go down this path in the future, particularly given the terrible building penetration that higher frequencies envisioned for 5G will have.
5) As someone who is very sensitive to the availability (or lack thereof) of rural service, I love Sprint's roaming agreements, as noted above. But also, it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that Sprint's service may not be as great in the rural areas as the urban areas. Those areas have fewer potential customers, meaning the return on investment may be small or non-existent, particularly if nobody bothers to switch carriers once the service is made available. If two carriers are already there, does it make sense to build out in that area if there are not enough potential customers to make it back? Will they switch at all if you provide service in the profitable town but not in the unprofitable surrounding areas in which they may live and work?
T-Mobile is doing rural expansion essentially by buying lots of low-band spectrum and deploying it relatively sparsely--essentially, it's designed to make those areas tolerable for people who are just passing through, but will likely not satisfy locals who will almost certainly stay with one of the existing players with better service in the area. It's probably cheaper for T-Mobile than roaming, but I doubt it results in better service if you're actually visiting one of those areas and not just passing through.
I apologize for the very long message, but hopefully it provides some insight and information.
- Trip
Full disclosure, I'm a Sprint customer for my primary line and an S4GRU staff member, a SatelliteGuys staff member, and as flagged in my signature, an FCC employee. I have cell phones for all five carriers (US Cellular being #5). Use whichever grains of salt you wish, but I'm also not interested in getting into a debate, so I may or may not choose to respond to any replies to this message. Just trying to provide information and clarity.
First, to some specific messages that caught my eye.
If you're in San Francisco, all the cell tower locations are public. The city makes them available.
Google Fusion Tables
How is it any different from paying $650 in termination fees if someone switches, as other carriers do? They're requiring customers bring their own device, meaning Sprint doesn't have to pay it off. If Sprint is charging $50/month for unlimited, over a year, that's $600. Basically the same amount, just not all paid up-front, with the added bonus of being able to say "free service!" Seems pretty smart to me.
A few larger subjects that caught my eye:
1) Antenna Search is a useful tool, but it's not a panacea. Outside of the state of Connecticut and a few municipalities such as San Francisco, noted above, there is no requirement that cell site locations be made public. Additionally, most cell companies do not own their own towers anymore, which makes identifying them from Antenna Search much more difficult. Some of the filings represent things that never got built. You may be able to find microwave links for those carriers on individual towers, particularly in rural areas, as well as older CLR licenses that indicated specific locations which haven't been updated in a decade or so, but that will definitely miss a lot.
That being said, I keep a private map of cell towers in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and other areas I frequent or are near where I may go at some point (I'm up to like 9,340 unique antenna structures or so). It's actually pretty straight-forward to track down the cell tower locations in many cases, particularly if you are in the area in question and have an Android phone with the right software. If your local building permitting office has their records online, you may have more luck looking there; in my county, they list the carrier involved on each permit filing on the public system, which makes tracking them very easy. Additionally, the official Sprint and T-Mobile maps, in less dense areas, are pretty good at narrowing down specific locations.
2) Comparing maps is a fruitless exercise. The maps of the carriers are not directly comparable. Verizon and AT&T greatly exaggerate their LTE maps, while T-Mobile is better but still shows "extended" LTE out to sometimes-ridiculous distances. Sprint's map looks the thinnest, but it's also the most honest of the four. Yes, they have holes, but so do the others. As noted by others here, if you don't like Sprint, don't use it. That's what competition is for.
As far as Open Signal and similar services are concerned, you have sampling bias. Verizon and AT&T have many more customers, as someone else noted, so it's easier to get a better sampling of customers. Further, unhappy customers are more likely to use speed tests or mapping services. There's also the question of the performance of individual devices, what bands and other enhancements those devices support, etc. A Sprint phone with HPUE (High-Power User Equipment) will have a different level of service than one without it, for example. A T-Mobile phone that doesn't support Band 12 will have bigger holes in coverage than one that does.
3) Sprint definitely made some questionable to outright poor decisions in the past. The Nextel purchase was a boondoggle, the WiMax deployment was a dead end, and the company is swimming in debt. Their original Band 41 deployment strategy likely wasted a lot of money. Their service has left something to be desired.
All of that said, Sprint has improved drastically. The Nextel purchase has actually worked out in their favor over the long term by giving them nearly-nationwide spectrum on 800 MHz for coverage (Band 26). The Band 41 deployment strategy has been retooled to be much cheaper and Sprint is back on track with deployment of that spectrum. Marcelo has done a great job getting the company as a whole back on track.
I've been a customer since 2014, when I got tired of using Verizon's aging 3G network via US Cellular roaming and switched away. Since that time, in my area, Sprint has turned on Band 25 second carrier and two or three carriers of Band 41 on most sites, having already been running Band 25 and 26 back then. They've added sites to fill in some of the bigger holes, and have applications on file to install small cells to fill the smaller holes, including some very near to where I live. I'm a Sprint customer because Sprint has roaming agreements with other carriers, specifically US Cellular (only carrier where my parents live, but no native service where I live), and Sprint now supports LTE roaming on those networks when out of the Sprint service area. Do I still encounter places where my other phones have service and Sprint does not? Sure. I also encounter the opposite. I have selected the service that best meets my needs at this time, and that is Sprint. If someone overbuilds where US Cellular is the only provider, I may opt to switch to that carrier instead.
4) The Magic Box is a good thing, and needing one to get inside a building is not a sign of a bad network. If you'll check, none of the carriers guarantee service inside buildings, and in fact many people connect to Wi-Fi in their homes for exactly that reason. The Magic Box is being provided to those who want it free of charge and it does not connect to your home network--it's a more advanced signal booster for the network that doesn't require you paying for separate service to help Sprint out. I won't be surprised to see other carriers go down this path in the future, particularly given the terrible building penetration that higher frequencies envisioned for 5G will have.
5) As someone who is very sensitive to the availability (or lack thereof) of rural service, I love Sprint's roaming agreements, as noted above. But also, it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that Sprint's service may not be as great in the rural areas as the urban areas. Those areas have fewer potential customers, meaning the return on investment may be small or non-existent, particularly if nobody bothers to switch carriers once the service is made available. If two carriers are already there, does it make sense to build out in that area if there are not enough potential customers to make it back? Will they switch at all if you provide service in the profitable town but not in the unprofitable surrounding areas in which they may live and work?
T-Mobile is doing rural expansion essentially by buying lots of low-band spectrum and deploying it relatively sparsely--essentially, it's designed to make those areas tolerable for people who are just passing through, but will likely not satisfy locals who will almost certainly stay with one of the existing players with better service in the area. It's probably cheaper for T-Mobile than roaming, but I doubt it results in better service if you're actually visiting one of those areas and not just passing through.
I apologize for the very long message, but hopefully it provides some insight and information.
- Trip
Trip, I respect your opinion and insight and always appreciate your posts over in the Rabbit Ears forum. The primary issue I still see with Sprint is that they haven't (and can't) increase their basic tower infrastructure (footprint) any further. Maybe small cells and spectrum can increase their signal penetration, but they won't ever have the same coverage the primary carriers have. Obviously, VZW and ATT believe the ROI for rural customers is important to them, and my contract with VZW is an example of that. Sprint doesn't "work for me" or any of the other 3,000 people who live in my area. So, I guess we don't matter to Sprint? That's cool I guess, but their claim that they are "within 1%" of all other carriers is outright nonsense. Period.
Until 2007, my town had zero cell phone towers. Then, Verizon built one as part of the "Broadband in Rural America" inititative. So, obviously they felt there was a chance to gain customers there, where Sprint passed on that chance.
Remember that "within 1%" is a reliability number. Sprint has a 1X/3G roaming agreement with Verizon, for example. In those places where Sprint does not have native service, a Sprint customer who is visiting will still have service from Verizon (or US Cellular, or other regional carriers), just not necessarily the fastest service. It does mean that someone in your position will likely not want to use Sprint, but does not mean their 1% claim is "nonsense."
- Trip
They have *some* roaming agreements with Sprint and USC. There are areas along my 45 minute, 35 mile drive to work where there are Verizon towers but no roaming agreement with Sprint. Trust me, I *want* to like Sprint. I want it to work. They just have a LOT of work left to do, and ignoring rural areas isn't a good strategy, IMO.
That strategy worked for T-Mobile.
Many people who live in cities rarely leave those cities except to go to other cities. Why would you not focus on the cities, where return on investment will be highest? It's a lot cheaper to improve service to a thousand people who live in apartment buildings than to a hundred people out in the sticks.
Think about it this way. To properly serve the county my parents are in, with fewer than 13,000 people, US Cellular uses 10 towers, three of which are not actually in the county, several of which were paid for by the USF, and even still there are large holes in coverage. Assuming everyone in the county is on US Cellular (they're not) that's an average of 1,300 people per tower, and you're not getting much pass-through traffic from non-residents either since few people drive through. Meanwhile, if Sprint installs a small cell that fixes the hole at the post office up the hill from me, not only do the hundreds of nearby residents instantly see improved service at their homes, but everyone going to the post office or one of the other businesses in that shopping center sees improved service, as does anyone waiting to pick people up in the Huntington Metro Kiss and Ride lot across the street--probably thousands of people stand to benefit on any given day. Which makes more sense as an investment of money?
Again, I'm as sympathetic to the plight of rural people as the next former resident of a very rural area, but you can't expect all of the carriers to provide excellent native service to the entire country. It just doesn't make financial sense.
- Trip
EDIT: Added the clause about the USF, which seems relevant here. If not for government subsidies, how much worse would service be there?
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I was forced to be on an ATT or Verizon network as there was no service for Tmo or Sprint at my in-laws house in a small WV town (and long stretches of the road that runs through that town along the Ohio river), and even at my parents' house in a suburb of a major city, I could barely get signal with Sprint when I used their wifi hotspot provided for me from my job.
Interesting note, outside of the immediate Parkersburg/Wood County area and the areas near Wheeling, Sprint doesn't run its own network in West Virginia. A company called nTelos ran it until very recently. nTelos was recently bought out by another Sprint partner, Shentel, who is in the middle of doing massive upgrades on the former nTelos network. In the Virginia nTelos areas where Shentel has completed their upgrades (which are still in progress), the difference has been like night and day.
- Trip
Isn't that what most of us have been saying here? In coverage, there are still more and larger swaths of dead areas with Sprint (and Tmo) than the other 2 providers, and they are still trying to catch up.
Doesn't matter how many times we say it. People treat Sprint like it is a religious institution they want to believe in for some reason.
I haven't seen that religious treatment you speak of...
What I have seen is people who don't want to hear their carrier might be inferior, but every other carrier compared to their IS inferior. It happens with cell providers, internet providers, tv providers...even models of vehicles...
Someone has a bad experience with Ford, so every Ford on the road MUST be garbage. Someone hates Charter, so all charter customers must also hate Charter along with them.
The points being made here were to curb MISINFORMATION about Sprint. Nobody is trying to hold them up to some God-like standard...
Just trying to point out the facts when it comes to Sprint and what/where they are... Simply put, it's easy to put down something when you have what you think is a better product.
If I had Verizon, it would be very easy for me to say that Sprint is garbage, when I have no clue when Sprint works, nor where it works, since I can't receive Sprint service on a Verizon phone.
Aside from Sprint, I can't imagine wanting service with anyone else..Verizon costs too much, AT&T can't get billing straight...and TMO is ran by a CEO who, to me, always looks like he just got finished bumping a hit of cocaine...
But that's just me.
What I have seen is people who don't want to hear their carrier might be inferior, but every other carrier compared to their IS inferior. It happens with cell providers, internet providers, tv providers...even models of vehicles...
Someone has a bad experience with Ford, so every Ford on the road MUST be garbage. Someone hates Charter, so all charter customers must also hate Charter along with them.
The points being made here were to curb MISINFORMATION about Sprint. Nobody is trying to hold them up to some God-like standard...
Just trying to point out the facts when it comes to Sprint and what/where they are... Simply put, it's easy to put down something when you have what you think is a better product.
If I had Verizon, it would be very easy for me to say that Sprint is garbage, when I have no clue when Sprint works, nor where it works, since I can't receive Sprint service on a Verizon phone.
Aside from Sprint, I can't imagine wanting service with anyone else..Verizon costs too much, AT&T can't get billing straight...and TMO is ran by a CEO who, to me, always looks like he just got finished bumping a hit of cocaine...
But that's just me.
I don't have Sprint, AT&T, VZN, or Tmo. But I do use AT&T's network because I can't use Sprint's or Tmo's.
I have AT&T for my DSL and I LITERALLY HATE THEM TO NO END....and I really wish they would just go bankrupt, or die in a fiery inferno...or whatever
Meanwhile, I'm receiving emails right now that my 150gb data limit on my DSL has been reached, and billing doesn't start over until 1st of month...
I have 2 DSL lines...because they won't give us decent speed service (and they actually think that 1/2 a meg upload is "broadband"..)
6mbps down / 0.5mbps up.
