91–100 of 112 posts
Not surprising. T-Mobile has always been a GSM network, CDMA is what they inherited from Sprint.
Why did they buy Sprint if it was not for their national CDMA network? Just to snag some subscribers? Were they assuming it would all depreciate away and they'd be left with the tower sites anyway?
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3G is supposed to shut down in July but curiously 2G will live until December 2022.
And even then it's controversial. 1st gen IoT devices used 2G, even when 3G was a thing. Things like emergency response in cars (eCall in Europe) and other types of infrastructure level "call home" technologies that were intended to work for decades but now must be upgraded before their 2G networks go dark. There's a bunch of hard to access industrial sensors that have worked fine for 20 years but now crews have to b…
I've seen it here with systems that rely on the voltage of phone lines to operate. They simply don't work with most digital telephony without additional hardware.
The consumer and business service industry doesn't stand still for industrial and IoT applications and time and time again do companies building these things assume this time things will be different. Whether it's 2G networking or Windows XP, failure to plan and make the necessary deals for the entire lifetime of the device is what's really causing these devices to fail.
If you can't make sure the necessary technology is available for the entire lifetime of your device (which can easily be 20 years or more for a car!) at least make your interface upgradable and well-documented.
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Not only are phones cross network compatible, with eSIM support, you can provision new service within minutes on any supported carrier, no physical SIM required.
I just activated a new phone with T-Mobile and they basically insisted on a physical SIM card. When I asked why they said they can do an eSIM but then I wouldn't get 5G. Is that true? If not, then why are they pushing physical SIM cards so hard?
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only are phones cross network compatible, with eSIM support, you can provision new service within minutes on any supported carrier, no physical SIM required.
I just activated a new phone with T-Mobile and they basically insisted on a physical SIM card. When I asked why they said they can do an eSIM but then I wouldn't get 5G. Is that true? If not, then why are they pushing physical SIM cards so hard?
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.
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.
It seems that a lot of companies have delayed their 3G sunset replacement plans until the last minute and then supply chain shortages pushed them over the deadline.
Are there stock shortages in the types of phones Boost would be offering as replacements for 3G phones? I wouldn't think so, but who knows.
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I just activated a new phone with T-Mobile and they basically insisted on a physical SIM card. When I asked why they said they can do an eSIM but then I wouldn't get 5G. Is that true? If not, then why are they pushing physical SIM cards so hard?
I can confirm that an eSIM should work with 5G without issue on Tmobile.
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Generally, but with a lot of exceptions and weirdness. For example, my OnePlus 6 is not supported, but if I modify my IMEI and APN those "impossible" features like VoLTE suddenly start working. Before they stopped automatic activation, I could put my SIM out of a supported phone, put it in an unsupported one, and those features would work for between fifteen minutes and a couple of hours. On the other hand, some hand…
Keep in mind that supported and features are not the same. Even if it technically can work doesn't mean that the provider wants to support it. Sometimes it's a simple as simply not having put the device through the testing process yet, or it simply hasn't been documented. And until it has, they don't want to risk any service costs so they simply don't whitelist it when the user base is insignificant enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind that supported and features are not the same. Even if it technically can work doesn't mean that the provider wants to support it. Sometimes it's a simple as simply not having put the device through the testing process yet, or it simply hasn't been documented. And until it has, they don't want to risk any service costs so they simply don't whitelist it when the user base is insignificant enough.
That argument sounds good until you remember T-Mobile, a company with less than half the annual revenue of AT&T, has absolutely no problem servicing any device with the proper frequency bands.