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Carrier Returning ATT iPhone 5c to get Sprint?
- Thread starter hillbilly181
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I have Sprint in the Austin area. Once they turned on the LTE... No complaints... Without LTE...awful. I was about to leave Sprint, then they rolled out LTE in my area... LTE is awesome... 3G, can't load a page most of the time#. You need to be sure LTE, works in your area. I've had no issues with LTE in LA... Worked fine.
No, the icon is simply there to tell you what type of signal you are getting. You can get weak LTE and the icon will still show as LTE. That's completely different from the bars which show voice signal strength.
This happened to me the other night at Walmart. Sprint is rolling out LTE in Phoenix and the other night I actually picked it up. I had full bars and voice because that's 1xRTT but crappy data because the LTE signal was weak. My phone showed full bars and LTE.
If you really want to get a good measure of this, put your iPhone in to field test (Google it) and then force quit the field test app. That will show and keep your bars as numbers. I.e., -67dbm. Anything from -50dbm to -99dbm is more or less usable signal. -100dbm is roaming. To get your bars back, just enter field test again and quit normally. Or you can just leave it like I mentioned and tap the numbers to switch back and forth between dbm and bars.
You must be kidding. Sprint has very poor coverage. They can afford to give you unlimited when you have no service!
DO NOT DO IT!
Uhm just a correction on that. Sprint has great nationwide 3G coverage. What they DON'T have is good or great CAPACITY. The entire damn network is congested because there are too many people using too much data and the old T-1 lines that Sprint is replacing cannot handle the load, much less speed. LTE is the same because it's just now being rolled out and the fiber-optic backhaul vendors, many of who have ties to AT&T and Verizon are being extremely slow to deliver backhaul. That means there is nothing to connect the new equipment to.You must be kidding. Sprint has very poor coverage. They can afford to give you unlimited when you have no service!
DO NOT DO IT!
I get what your trying to say, but coverage is something completely different than capacity. And capacity is where Sprint is falling down right now.
Sprints LTE is no bad at all ... I average 14 Mbps and 8 or9 Mbps up all the time. It gets better too. In some areAs I am getting 23 Mbps down. So if you are in an LTE are and are getting an LTE phone you will have no problems. I have an iPhone 5c and my speeds are just fine.
I'm not defending Sprint. They have been slow in there roll out, but I have been with them for years and I can say this time I think they might be telling the truth lol ..
I'm not defending Sprint. They have been slow in there roll out, but I have been with them for years and I can say this time I think they might be telling the truth lol ..
This is slightly inaccurate. Voice is also transmitted on 3G, and most phone will fallback on the 3G protocol to deliver voice. The transmission is far more secure than the 2G GPRS networks. LTE is Data only. 3G was actually designed for voice only. Data was tacked on after the fact, which is why it sucks.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/484056/
OK. I'll concede a bit where it concerns GSM.
But CDMA cannot do voice and data at the same time and Sprint uses 1xRTT for voice. 3G and LTE are for data on Sprint. I don't know about Verizon (whether they use 3G and LTE for voice or not), but Verizon also cannot do voice and data at the same time as Verizon is also CDMA.
That may change once Sprint gets a triband iPhone.
You are correct. That very flaw in CDMA is why ATT has been touting "Surf and talk" at the same time for years.
Verizon uses 1xEV-DO
they might use RTT too but i'm not sure.
If Sprint ever does this all I can see is it getting me in trouble!
I can't imagine my wife being happy that I'm surfing the web when talking to her at the same time.
I don't love Sprint yet. I have a 5C and before that a 4, and the LTE on my 5C is incredible! But 3G on my 4 was abysmal. My girlfriend and few others who have T-Mobile have good 3G when it's available, but from what I've seen their 3G and LTE for that matter are very sporadic. I have seen my gf multiple times fall to EDGE on her iPhone 4S. I'm sticking with Sprint because I see good things ahead for their LTE. Bottom line ask people around you which is more reliable and go with that option.
Sorry but a friend and I do a lot of traveling on our nations highways and her Sprint phone lacks COVERAGE when she has no signal between cities while my ATT has 1/2 to full bars. Without coverage, we are not worrying about capacity.
Well, they don't have coverage everywhere, but then neither does any of the carriers. So, we could probably go around and around on this just based on our own experiences.
I agree that the network sucks right now. In my own area where LTE is coming in it is slowly, incrementally improving, but it's pretty bad otherwise.
Meh. You'd be hard pressed to find a city in the USA where Verizon doesn't have LTE service.
I'm talking about real cities, not towns with less than 5000 people.
When I mentioned coverage earlier I was specific to 3G. I acknowledged that LTE is seriously lacking. Sprint is way behind on LTE and won't finish until at least mid-year next.
But Sprint 3G is nationwide. It's crappy and damn slow, but it's there. LTE isn't.
Thank you! It just makes sense. I could rave about Sprint, because I have no problems with them, but I'm just outside Seattle with LTE.
I just changed from Sprint to Verizon and I couldn't be happier.
For some reason - even with the LTE connection icon lit my Sprint connection was really sketchy. I couldn't explain that but, as a rule, I'd see web pages loading in a stuttering way and often dropping connection even with "four bars" and the LTE logo. I didn't know any better so I stayed with them until 2 weeks ago.
Understand that there's "fine print" to their "unlimited plan" which may or may not affect you. In my case it affected me and I was forced to switch. My story is below.
Below is a repost of my last rant:
Had their "unlimited plan" for my whole family.
My work place has spotty Sprint coverage but the salesman assured that they're actively expanding in that region. Besides, I'd be covered by antennas from other providers in the meanwhile.
3 months later I got a warning that I was exceeding my monthly roaming allowance on my "unlimited" plan. They explained that, while they don't charge for excessive use on an unlimited plan - they do reserve the right to terminate my plan. They advised shutting off roaming data and voice on my phone in order to prevent future violations.
Unfortunately this meant my phone was useless at work. I left the data and voice on and just tried to budget my time. Last week they sent me a notice of termination in 2 weeks.
I talked to the kind salesperson who said he was powerless. I talked to CS who "apologized" and said that the decision was made by a separate department and they were powerless to reverse the decision. They would not forward me to any representative of that department but assured me that my concerns will be relayed up the chain and said to have a nice day.
I can fault their salesmen who were pushing the product so hard they promised that Sprint LTE would support simultaneous voice and data by January at the latest. Shame on me for not checking the facts but I was in a trusting mood that day.
It's September and I was still getting most of my service as "roaming data."
I can fault their business model which has the salesmen telling me flat out that they have no leverage with CS to negotiate on my behalf to restore services. Then CS for saying they had no power to restore my services either.
I can fault the business for marketing an "Unlimited Plan" with fine print that matters a lot to a small minority of victims, like myself.
It's like an all you can eat ice cream shop which doesn't tell you it's only unlimited as long as it's vanilla and kicks you out for eating too much chocolate ice cream. Even when you offer to pay extra for the chocolate they tell you to get off their property.
Sprint is not my friend.
For some reason - even with the LTE connection icon lit my Sprint connection was really sketchy. I couldn't explain that but, as a rule, I'd see web pages loading in a stuttering way and often dropping connection even with "four bars" and the LTE logo. I didn't know any better so I stayed with them until 2 weeks ago.
Understand that there's "fine print" to their "unlimited plan" which may or may not affect you. In my case it affected me and I was forced to switch. My story is below.
Below is a repost of my last rant:
Had their "unlimited plan" for my whole family.
My work place has spotty Sprint coverage but the salesman assured that they're actively expanding in that region. Besides, I'd be covered by antennas from other providers in the meanwhile.
3 months later I got a warning that I was exceeding my monthly roaming allowance on my "unlimited" plan. They explained that, while they don't charge for excessive use on an unlimited plan - they do reserve the right to terminate my plan. They advised shutting off roaming data and voice on my phone in order to prevent future violations.
Unfortunately this meant my phone was useless at work. I left the data and voice on and just tried to budget my time. Last week they sent me a notice of termination in 2 weeks.
I talked to the kind salesperson who said he was powerless. I talked to CS who "apologized" and said that the decision was made by a separate department and they were powerless to reverse the decision. They would not forward me to any representative of that department but assured me that my concerns will be relayed up the chain and said to have a nice day.
I can fault their salesmen who were pushing the product so hard they promised that Sprint LTE would support simultaneous voice and data by January at the latest. Shame on me for not checking the facts but I was in a trusting mood that day.
It's September and I was still getting most of my service as "roaming data."
I can fault their business model which has the salesmen telling me flat out that they have no leverage with CS to negotiate on my behalf to restore services. Then CS for saying they had no power to restore my services either.
I can fault the business for marketing an "Unlimited Plan" with fine print that matters a lot to a small minority of victims, like myself.
It's like an all you can eat ice cream shop which doesn't tell you it's only unlimited as long as it's vanilla and kicks you out for eating too much chocolate ice cream. Even when you offer to pay extra for the chocolate they tell you to get off their property.
Sprint is not my friend.
Good luck watching a game on Sprint's network. I can't even load 1 minute Youtube videos.
You're mistaken. If you ever watch a transition from 3G to LTE or vice versa, you will see the signal bars change. Just now, I had a full LTE signal because I'm close to a tower. When I turned off LTE, my bars then dropped to three and 3G is now my icon.
If you had full bars LTE and the data was bad, it's most likely that the new tower is not really ready for usage yet. I have seen this behavior before.
All right. I've been wrong before, so this wouldn't be the first time. Can you tell me though why all the Google research I do says that bars stand for voice signal and not data?
http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/2040-bars-lie-for-lte-signal-strength-how-to-determine-your-actual-lte-signal-strength/
You're right for the most part, except with the iPhone. See the end of the first post at that link