Sprint's Network Has Been Officially Retired (theverge.com) 12
As of yesterday, Sprint's LTE network has been retired by its new owner, T-Mobile. That's along with Sprint's 3G CDMA network, which was shut down earlier this year, and what remained of T-Mobile's own 3G network, which enters retirement today. The Verge reports: It may come as a surprise that any part of Sprint's network was still operational so recently. In April 2020, T-Mobile officially took ownership of the company, including all of its spectrum and network towers, which would ultimately be repurposed for 5G. Sprint's 3G CDMA network was the first to go when T-Mobile started to shut down Sprint's systems in March. It had originally planned to sunset the network at the end of 2021, but after a heated debate over anti-competitive behavior during which Dish chairman Charlie Ergen called T-Mobile a Grinch, the date was pushed back.
Sprint's LTE network followed later and was set to be officially retired as of yesterday, June 30th, 2022. Unlike the company's 3G network, which our former executive editor Dieter Bohn paid appropriate tribute to in his Sprint eulogy, there's not much of a reason to mourn its loss. Sprint was late to LTE after betting first on WiMAX, and as a consequence, its LTE network lagged far behind the competition by the time it was up and running. It was flat-out bad, actually.
Sprint's LTE network followed later and was set to be officially retired as of yesterday, June 30th, 2022. Unlike the company's 3G network, which our former executive editor Dieter Bohn paid appropriate tribute to in his Sprint eulogy, there's not much of a reason to mourn its loss. Sprint was late to LTE after betting first on WiMAX, and as a consequence, its LTE network lagged far behind the competition by the time it was up and running. It was flat-out bad, actually.
When I went from Sprint to T-Mobile (Score:2)
Re:When I went from Sprint to T-Mobile (Score:4, Informative)
I had the opposite experience with Sprint. I switched from Sprint to T-Mobile back in 2013 because Sprint's service was so god damn unreliable. I still remember downloading basically *anything* on Sprint's network made the phone get super hot because it had to maximize the antenna gain just to get data across slowly, and the battery likewise wouldn't last for shit. When I switched to T-Mobile, which had supposedly inferior HSPA+ as opposed to Sprint's wimax, my nexus 4 downloaded the apps so fast I thought it was on wifi. Only it wasn't. Not only that, but it didn't drain the fucking battery.
Oh and if that wasn't enough, when I called Sprint's phone number from the now T-Mobile service to ensure my account was closed, I could actually hear the their hold music [youtube.com]. Sprint's quality was so muddy that it just sounded like little honking sounds being randomly played. Oh and T-Mobile to T-Mobile calls were actually wideband audio, first carrier to ever do so, so they were even clearer, I could even hear people whispering in the background on the other end.
And the best thing? Basically the single most annoying thing about Sprint is that when there was an incoming call, the other person would hear on average three rings before Sprint even sent one ring to my phone, and very often the first ring would come in just as it was already being sent to voicemail. Pissed me off to no fucking end. With T-Mobile that problem was GONE. Literally the very first ring the other person heard would coincide almost exactly with the first ring I heard. Sprint also kept swearing to me that they had never dropped a call while I was on their service. They even denied it when the call dropped while I was speaking to them and they had to call me back. No more dropped calls on T-Mobile.
Sprint also always kept promising that big improvements were right around the corner. Such a fucking lie. They never fixed shit, right up until the day they were gone. Sprint is one carrier I WON'T miss. Is it bad that there's less competition? Yeah, but Sprint never came anywhere close to being what I would consider a worthy competitor to anything.
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I had sprint way way back in their early digital days (something like 24 years ago) and it was great. Cheap, phones were pretty decent, great coverage, great quality compared to everyone else. They went downhill while I was cellphoneless. By the time I got another one T-Mobile was the big thing, so I got on it, and ugh. Their coverage maps were blatant lies. The prices were only OK. The call quality was poop.
I'm not really trying to contradict you though, only trying to suggest that the difference wasn't ne
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It wasn't just Sprint's LTE network that was retired. Today is also the day T-Mobile retired their own UMTS network, which required me to replace my older T-Mobile phone. At least they offered me a mid-range 5G phone that will be covered by 24 monthly rebates.
As of March 31, 2022, Sprint’s older 3G (CDMA) network will be retired
As of June 30, 2022, Sprint’s LTE network will be retired
As of July 1, 2022, T-Mo
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Re:Sprint's 3G isn't something to mourn about eith (Score:5, Informative)
It sucked. Like most cellphone companies that deployed Qualcomm's CDMA standards, it was adopted to be cheap rather than because of any theoretical technical advantages it had. Call drops were common if you just moved a few hundred feet. The major issue was that it was generally overcapacity, and CDMA's infamous breathing issues resulted in each cell site reducing in size during peak times to the point there were gaps between them.
Add to that the complete lack of technological improvement over GSM when it came to higher levels - Sprint users had to wait until the early 2000s for two way text messaging, and for any form of data, and SIM cards were never a thing until everyone realized LTE was the future - and, well, the entire system felt like it was stuck in a time pocket.
Meanwhile the GSM people tried using GSM with a Code Division Multiple Access type air interface, and it turned out to be... suboptimal to say the least, which is why we're finally getting off it and moving to OFDMA, which is what we should have been experimenting with in the early 2000s if it wasn't for Qualcomm's lobbying.
I don't want to sound like a downer, Sprint itself made mobile telephony accessible to many people at a time when AT&T Mobility (barely any relation) and the Bells were charging a fortune, locking people into long contracts, and requiring onerous credit checks. But, as Voicestream (now T-Mobile) proved, they could have done that with a solid, proven, technology and choose not to.
[emphasis mine]
The reason we the "GSM people"* used Code Division Multiple Acccess (called WCDMA) for our 3G needs was not "Qualcomm Lobbying" (feel free to hate Qualcomm nonetheless, they deserve it).
It was that, in the late 90's when the technology/standard was being defined/hammered, it was feassible to do binary multiplication on the orthogonal binary codes in the CHIRPS with the power and heat envelope and semiconductor technology for handheld mobile phones of the era, and the predicted improvements for the 10 year lifetime of 3G.
WCDMA also suffered from "breathing cells".
Meanwhile the (inverse) Fast Fourier Transforms needed for OFDMA encoding/decoding were nigh impossible on the power envelope and thermals of a MobilePhone of the era (late 90's early 00's, Ni-Cad batteries, Ni-MH if you were fancy), and the Doppler Effect and Multipath when using RADIO OFDM in a moving vehicle in a city (as opposed to, let's say, the OFDM in an ADSL line) were a though nut to crack. That's why it was not done in the 3G realm, neiher by us "GSM people", nor by the German-Chinese TD-SCDMA.
See a trend? All 3G technologies are CDMA based. even the sino-euro one, with no hope of ever comming to the US. Why would that be? Let me reiterate: Not Qualcomm lobbying. ;-)
At least, WCDMA abandoned all pretense of coexistence and mandated a minimum channel width of 5Mhz (could be reduced to 3.5Mhz with some dirty tricks) and a guard band if to coexsist with 2G, hence the W in W-CDMA, the Qualcomm camp instead opted for a 1,25Mhz minimum channel width to "be compatible with AMPS radio Channels", that most opperators sheepishly adopted... with the effects you so well described...
* And yes, I am GSM people, as in employee #0000024 of the biggest GSM operator in my country a long while ago.
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It sucked. Like most cellphone companies that deployed Qualcomm's CDMA standards, it was adopted to be cheap rather than because of any theoretical technical advantages it had. Call drops were common if you just moved a few hundred feet. The major issue was that it was generally overcapacity, and CDMA's infamous breathing issues resulted in each cell site reducing in size during peak times to the point there were gaps between them.
The problem with CDMA is that it's hard to calculate utilization from simple
and 2G soldiers on (Score:4, Interesting)
That explains it (Score:2)
I recently upgraded my cellphone after my provider (Telus, here in Canada) started sending me messages that my antique phone would be a paperweight in the U.S. as of 1 July. Now I know why.
Historically, it would roam on to AT&T or T-Mobile. The former was better for calls to the U.S., the latter worked better for calls to Canada.
...laura
Sprint's biggest mistake (Score:2)
The biggest strategic mistake Sprint made was their decision to have Samsung make the Galaxy S3 using the cheaper LTE-only chip instead of the pin-compatible variant that could do BOTH Wimax & LTE (albeit, requiring a reboot to switch modes), so if you bought a S3 & lived in a Wimax city, your phone was basically an unusable EVDO paperweight for the first year or two. Literally 2/3 of the former Sprint users at my office left Sprint over the whole S3-Wimax debacle (myself included).
The sad thing is,
Ima... (Score:2)
...former Sprint customer that switched to T-Mobile many years ago after experiencing lies, misinformation and terrible service from the former. Example: I once paid Sprint to upgrade my service plan so my phone would work in Asia after being assured that it would. It never did. However, the straw that broke the camel's back was when it outright refused to unlock my carrier-locked phone. I said FU to that and dumped it like the bag of trash it was.
After switching to T-Mobile (and getting an unlocked phone)