101–110 of 112 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> handsets that don't work with VoLTE It's kind of amazing to watch them keep pushing out half-baked protocols with the details on what phones actually support being so hard to find. I guess the lesson they learned from rolling out LTE phones with no Voice over LTE support is that nobody really cares, which is why they repeated the same issues with 5G and there's all this stuff about "non-standalone 5G".
It might be to find info about VoLTE support because VoLTE phones started coming out seven years ago. The Nexus 6 was the first Nexus/Pixel device to support VoLTE (I seem to vaguely recall the 5 was capable of VoLTE, but no carrier enabled it?), and the iPhone 6 was the first iPhone to do so. I think you'd be very hard pressed to find a 4G phone that doesn't support VoLTE. GSMarena usually has the most extensive spe…
But it's just as hard to find information about various 5G features and those differ a lot by device and service.
This kind of thing should be on the same page as the list of radio frequencies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of those "but actually" things that always happens (and why I can't give a straight answer and why I should have hedged that statement as well). The question was about the US and Apple and I responded about the US and Apple, but I should have know I'd get a "but actually" if I didn't hedge everything. I don't know what country/network you're talking about, but it looks like Uzbekistan might be the only co…
I'm having trouble finding things with searching tonight. But I think I know where to look to get the pointers I need... I'll see if I can dig up some examples tomorrow. Although, maybe I'll find that everyone has moved to LTE. I was dealing with phone numbers for several years and there had been several networks which were CDMA for home phones only in otherwise GSM nations that started doing mobile phones. I suspect…
Not surprising. T-Mobile has always been a GSM network, CDMA is what they inherited from Sprint.
This is mostly about drama around Boost Mobile. T-Mobile wanted to shut down their CDMA network on January 1, 2022. Boost (now owned by Dish) doesn't want to upgrade users that have handsets that don't work with VoLTE. Upgrading users involves sending them notices, giving them options of free handsets, shipping those handsets, getting the users to actually activate them, etc. While T-Mobile gave Boost nearly double t…
You basically had to maintain some level of cognitive dissonance to sell these companies on Sprint service because we all knew it would never work.
Not surprising. T-Mobile has always been a GSM network, CDMA is what they inherited from Sprint.
This is mostly about drama around Boost Mobile. T-Mobile wanted to shut down their CDMA network on January 1, 2022. Boost (now owned by Dish) doesn't want to upgrade users that have handsets that don't work with VoLTE. Upgrading users involves sending them notices, giving them options of free handsets, shipping those handsets, getting the users to actually activate them, etc. While T-Mobile gave Boost nearly double t…
Did they ever even build out a 4G network? Some years back I was a regular on Howard Forums[0], and I recall from discussions there that Dish had sat on some big chunks of spectrum for years and never built out a network with it, even back when 4G LTE was the latest and greatest. I guess nothing has changed.
[0] https://howardforums.com/ <-- discussions and flamewars about cellular service
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> T-Mobile gave Boost nearly double the required time, Boost complained that it wasn't enough The CPUC says T-Mobile representatives lied under oath. They claimed that Dish would have until 2023 to migrate customers off of the CDMA network. T-Mobile is facing sanctions because of it: https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M398/K955/... Not a long read.
The hearing was scheduled for 2021-09-20, over two months ago. Any idea what the outcome was? I tried poking around here[1], but CPUC public discoverability is up there with the worst of enterprise...never mind that a decision/resolution/ruling/general order all sound roughly asymptotic to a non-lawyer. [1] https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seemed strange that T-Mobile would have a CDMA network, until you remembered that it came from Sprint. This seems like good news. I'm glad that starting with LTE all the carriers started agreeing on a single platform with SIM cards. Even though there are little nuances between each carrier, the fact that you can buy a single phone and have it work with the four (three now) major carriers is a big deal.
Not really. There have always been smartphones that supported both GSM and CDMA. The three major carriers not only use different LTE bands, but also Verizon and shortly AT&T (in February) have adopted a whitelist model where only select handsets can be activated on their networks. It's a much less open marketplace than it was five years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> T-Mobile gave Boost nearly double the required time, Boost complained that it wasn't enough The CPUC says T-Mobile representatives lied under oath. They claimed that Dish would have until 2023 to migrate customers off of the CDMA network. T-Mobile is facing sanctions because of it: https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M398/K955/... Not a long read.
Thank you for sharing this. This is actual news and I am somewhat dismayed that none of my news feeds picked it up ( I have long given up on dramarama news edition ). I clearly need to made something more custom.
I read it months ago from the curated news mix on https://prepaidcompare.net/
The pair of articles I recal were originally from fiercewireless.
No RSS feeds I'm afraid, you'll have to scrape the site to make your own.
Not surprising - Boost Mobile's primary market is poor folks generally and especially inner city minorities. "Getting a new phone" or "getting a fancy newly released phone" is less viable financially for this market so they are going to lag on abandoning older standards like CDMA because they are sticking to cheap phones in their budget.
>Boost Mobile's primary market is poor folks generally and especially inner city minorities. Any support for that claim? My spouse and I used to be on Virgin Mobile, which closed and transferred us to Boost. We are certainly not in the category you mention, and I never got the feeling that either Virgin Mobile or Boost were just for poor, "especially inner city" people.
Virgin wasn't. Boost was. That's why they needed a second prepaid brand.
Tons of evidence to this effect, you just have to go looking for it:
"Boost’s strategy was to go after the young adult market in inner cities. The company tailored its advertising to this group by working with hiphop artists and action sports stars. It also used the slogan “Where you at?” in its marketing messages."
https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/marek-s-take-boost-m...
T-Mobile is of largely the same ilk. Call up support and you'll be greeted by a rep with: "Yo. What's up?" Probably why T-Mobile always retained its namesake prepaid brand as well. In the old days pre-paid cell service was overwhelmingly for the poor, who might be late to pay. Respectable folks signed a 2-year contract and paid any price their provider told them they owed.
I ended up on Boost Mobile in the early days by a complete fluke. It was lucky though, as the service was cheap, phones were heavily subsidized, coverage of the iDEN network was excellent everywhere I tried it (Sprint coverage was always horrible everywhere) with just some problems of network congestion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is mostly about drama around Boost Mobile. T-Mobile wanted to shut down their CDMA network on January 1, 2022. Boost (now owned by Dish) doesn't want to upgrade users that have handsets that don't work with VoLTE. Upgrading users involves sending them notices, giving them options of free handsets, shipping those handsets, getting the users to actually activate them, etc. While T-Mobile gave Boost nearly double t…
How do you keep tabs on all this stuff? Are you reading press releases? I often wonder how some random person on HN seems to always know so much detail about some specific company. I am also trying to figure out the best way to do a deep dive on a company (any company).
There are plenty of sites that publish news about cellular carriers. It's a technical pursuit like any other. You can assign someone to read Microsoft press releases all day, and they won't ever become an expert Windows programmer... You won't be able to become an expert on a company with a crash program, either, years of accumulated knowledge and subject matter experience and interest count for a lot.
> know so much detail about some specific company.
The three major US cellular carriers hold a great deal of power over all of us. It's something people keep informed about. No doubt around here quite a few people's livelihoods are dependent on keeping abreast of cellular technology as well, providing extra motivation.