Not saying I agree with this necessarily. Just sharing for discussion's sake.
Analyst: Dish Could Gain in T-Mobile-Sprint Hookup | Multichannel
Analyst: Dish Could Gain in T-Mobile-Sprint Hookup | Multichannel
Analyst: Dish could gain in T-Mobile Sprint Merger
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It would be best for Dish to just sell their spectrum. If you look at how D* is doing after their merger you would see all of their CSR’s are over seas and really don’t know much. If dish did a merger there’s a good chance we’ll lose our better CSR’s. Right now there’s a lot of people switching from D* to Dish because of their crappy customer service and inferior equipment. IMO D* is light years behind.
If, as the article suggests, Dish becomes an MVNO of the combined T-Mobile and Sprint, would people buy device from them?
I just left ATT for T-MOBILE. I sure don't want to see T-Mobile contaminated by anything Sprint!
T-mobile is a GSM network and sprint is CDMA. So business wise it would be smart. It would make it so in areas where GDM only work in bigger cites (like by me) it would slow them to make a profit on people who live in the country where CDMA is a must. The carrier I’m with doesn’t really have the best deals but it’s pretty much my only option because I need CDMA coverage. So, if t-mobile and sprint merge that actually might be a good thing. But under no circumstances should they merge with dish.
Why do you think CDMA matters in rural areas? It is the availability of signal, due to which carrier has antennas and licensed spectrum in a particular area which determines whether you get signal, not which technology is carried over that spectrum.
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That isn't how it's going to work. GSM and CDMA are being phased out in favor of various flavors of LTE voice. They'll never expand CDMA to other towers, nor make any great efforts to expand individual cell phones to deal with multiple vendors much different than they do today. Billing changes, maybe.
The different technologies in use make such a merger problematic. It only makes sense for phasing in today's best and future technologies, such as 5G.
I fear Sprint is damaged goods, and brings nothing to the merger table except some customers to be converted.
Sprint has spectrum (not sure of the quality) and customers (also not sure of the actual value here). Merging also gets rid of competition, which large companies seem to like. It gives them more sway with regulators, politicians, etc.
Sprint leases out a lot of spectrum. T-Mobile has a lot of spectrum. Not sure who has what, to see if here complementary.
Yes, I know they want to expand 5g but CDMA usually travels farther/better than GSM frequency’s. In my area there’s a couple towers near us that are shared between GSM and CDMA. I get a much better CDMA signal from it than GSM. Back when I used android daily I used some apps to monitor what tower and frequency I was on. CDMA was always stronger.
CDMA end-of-life is just a few years away. There's no stopping that train. Verizon, ATT and Tmo already have deadlines in place for phasing out their legacy networks. 1xRTT ends in 2019, 3G CDMA ends in 2022. Verizon is even starting to sell LTE-only phones. Fallback networks' days are numbered.
CDMA is actually better suited to high-density areas, like cities, as it can handle more simultaneous calls than GSM. GSM and CDMA on the same frequency, tower location, and elevation will provide the same coverage area. More than likely, your CDMA carrier has A and/or B cellular frequency licenses, which provides the best non-LTE coverage in your location, while the GSM carrier(s) in the area are stuck on 1.9GHz PCS bands. Did your Android app specify the freq. that each technology was using?
Looks like in your area Sprint and Verizon hold the 800MHz bands, and both offer CDMA service, so I can see why you might think CDMA is better.
Verizon by me only gets 1-2 bars and no data. I’m with us cellular which uses some of sprints towers but also have a lot of their own and are still expanding. Sprint by itself will get me somewhat decent signal with 4g(not LTE) data. But if I go north any it loses signal pretty fast and has to roam; probably on us cellular’s towers, and gets no data. Back when we moved here we still had alltell until they merged with Verizon and we lost our good signal due to them taking down a few towers. So I’m always gonna be partial to sprint or if available us cellular. Unless I was planning on living in town without intentions to leave often I’m just gonna stick with what I have. Maybe in the future when 5g is widespread I’ll try one of the other networks if the offer some kind of burner phone for those that can’t lock in to a commitment without verifying signal quality themselves.
12 years ago when I moved to Iowa we had to subscribe to USC, there was no other carrier that served our small community. Over the years, that changed. As long as I stayed in Iowa, my service was fine. Our area had 4g relatively early, and other than always being the last to get new phones (until Samsung started to make their push to be the biggest), USC was not a bad provider. Unless I left the state of Iowa. Then, while I never had a time I could not receive or make a voice call, my data coverage went heck. At best I would get 3g, and a lot of the time I was stuck on 1x. I have relatives in Minnesota, and make trips there on business. Other relatives in New York, Las Angeles, Houston, Seattle, and Missouri, as well as the occasional business trip. The only time I could count on 4g outside of Iowa was at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. No data at all in the St. Louis area, just at Busch, USC had a contract with the Cardinals. So last year we switched to Verizon so that we could get real national coverage, not what USC laughingly called nationwide coverage. It didn't hurt that my wife switched jobs a couple of years ago, and her employer has a contract with Verizon that gives us a 25% discount. My signal is just fine, especially when I'm in one of the cities in my area that have the LTE Advanced service. I've hit 101 mb down, 40 up. Can't wait for 5g.
It should actually be CDMA based carriers vs GSM based carriers since both are operating LTE for 4G and only GSM (TDMA based) or CDMA with 3G and earlier. Both CDMA and GSM carriers can be System A or System B depending if they are traditional cellular carriers or not. In the San Francisco Bay Area for example:
The System A (wireless) carrier is AT&T Wireless which was known as Bay Area Cellular One (40% originally owned by McCaw then AT&T with the 60% owned by Pacific Telesis later Vodafone Airtouch and later AT&T as part of the Verizon Wireless formed by the BellAtlantic/GTE merger which came from GTE Wireless, BellAtlantic Mobility, PrimeCo PCS and Vodafone Airtouch) that runs on GSM and TDMA before that.
System B (wireline) is Verizon Wireless which was GTE Wireless before the BellAtlantic/GTE Merger
SprintPCS is the 1.9Ghz PCS carrier running CDMA that did not exist until 1996 or so
T-Mobile is the 1.9Ghz PCS carrier running GSM that did not exist until 1996 or so
There was also Cingular Wireless which started as Pacific Bell Mobile Services in 1996 or so
With both T-Mobile and Cingular Wireless before Cingular Wireless became AT&T Wireless after SBC bought AT&T, the service was almost non-existent as the phone was more of a brick most of the time. T-Mobile did not have a network in California or Nevada and used Cingular's towers in CA/NV while Cingular used T-Mobiles network and towers in NYC. When AT&T Wireless merged with Cingular Wireless, AT&T had to sell the Cingular network known as AT&T Orange to T-Mobile so T-Mobile had it's own network in CA/NV from that point.
The Cellular based CDMA carrier (system B) is superior to the GSM/TDMA based carrier (system A) even though CDMA is really 1950s US Military technology but TDMA was used first by System A a few years before System B even went TDMA as it was all Analog with AMPS and NAMPS before that. So it's actually the two PCS carriers that while they have 800Mhz and other frequencies still would lack because the networks are new and they are not able to built the same footprint as the two system A and B providers who already had their networks for atleast 10 years before the 1.9Ghz PCS carriers started.
Not sure specifically about San Francisco, although I have visited several times for work and found huge dead spots on Verizon and AT&T (post-Cingular GSM) over the years. Verizon was probably better IIRC.
In my neck of the woods, AT&T's (pre-Cingular) TDMA (aka Digital AMPS) network did not convert well to GSM. The GTE CDMA network that became Verizon was built with towers closer together, so it was the superior 850MHz network. When AT&T tried to overlay their TDMA network with GSM, coverage suddenly had tons of holes on GSM, while the old TDMA phones still worked fine. Cingular had similar issues when they moved from TDMA to GSM around the same time, but not nearly as bad. Apparently, TDMA allowed for weaker signals than GSM did before it dropped. IMHO, they should have known this.
Anyway, AT&T got bought by Cingular, they eventually merged Blue and Orange networks, and the 1900MHz spectrum was used to fill in the holes in the 850MHz spectrum, and now they have 700MHz. Now AT&T is about as good and sometimes better than Verizon, depending on where you are. In the end, the GSM vs CDMA has little or nothing to do with it, except that some GSM networks were built over TDMA networks, which were able to provide coverage with towers further apart. Perhaps that is the case in WI. I am not familiar with the history in that part of the country.
GTE's CDMA is newer since GTE didn't have CDMA until 1996 or 1997 while AT&T had TDMA way before that. GTE/Verizon Wireless had always been better but was always the more expensive carrier. AT&T when they started with GSM wasn't all that great as it seems like the TDMA had excellent coverage while GSM was a joke. Cingular in California was always GSM as it's basically a PCS network. But wasn't the reason the GSM had problems was because it was originally running at 1.9Ghz instead of 850Mhz? AT&T Wireless if I remembered correctly got spinned off as a separate company and then Cingular bought AT&T Wireless so AT&T Wireless no longer existed and then the next thing was when SBC (Southwestern Bell Communications) bought AT&T Wireless, they basically got rid of the Cingular name and renamed everything to AT&T. Has T-Mobile improved their network coverage though?
Over last two years T-Mobile has doubled their LTE coverage.
They've just now started putting up "towers" for 600 MHz support. THAT should make a BIG difference. It seems they plan a huge investment over the next year to get (most?) of it done by the end of 2018. I think the final completion is 2020.
By the time Apple puts out a band 71 supporting phone, there will be a lot of places with 600 MHz in place.
I wonder where all that investment money is coming from.
They've just now started putting up "towers" for 600 MHz support. THAT should make a BIG difference. It seems they plan a huge investment over the next year to get (most?) of it done by the end of 2018. I think the final completion is 2020.
By the time Apple puts out a band 71 supporting phone, there will be a lot of places with 600 MHz in place.
I wonder where all that investment money is coming from.
