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Comment by mehrdadn | Hacker News Reader

> Remember that with LTE, there's no longer a divide between the GSM camp and the CDMA camp; it's the same LTE, although each carrier operates on various bands.

Don't they have antennas in different locations though? Like even if your phone doesn't have compatibility issues with SIMs or bands, calling it "the same LTE" makes it seem like you could just pay someone else and get reception in the same areas which I don't think is the case?

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It's more that most phones support most of the bands all the US providers use, so when the roaming policy changes, a lot of the phones will still work. The phone will be able to register with the roaming network.

Also, they can set up the antennas to broadcast on multiple MNCs, so it looks like a native network (i.e. T-Mobile can run LTE towers that broadcast as both the T-Mobile and old Sprint network so all Sprint phones can connect without a problem) (of course, this depends on Boost phones supporting VoLTE).

Your phone using a different-besides-your-home network is called 'roaming' and it's not uncommon. For this to happen, your phone needs to know which networks it should try to authenticate against.

A while back, Sprint and T-Mobile announced they'd launch a roaming agreement for LTE that would last for 4 years, and that would be honored even if their merger doesn't go through. According to some people [1] this went into effect in Summer 2018.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Sprint/comments/9548zg/tmobile_data...

Yes in theory. But you can't roam the entire time or everywhere another provider has signal; in fact I've never managed to use it because I've only tried it in locations where my provider has awful coverage, and my phone's been unable to register. It's clearly only tailored to allowing you to get some semblance of service when you go out of the official range on occasion. It has various limits and T-Mobile terminates your contract if you roam more than half the time. So it's not like you can live somewhere out of their range and just change whom you pay your bills to and switch to roaming most of the time.

I don't understand what you're asking in your prior post when you say whether you could "pay someone else". Your carrier makes the agreements about with which others your phone could roam (and with who it can't), and your phone tries among the ones it can, but clearly not among the ones it can't. You continue to pay your bill to your home network. And yes, there are often restrictions with how much you can roam.

That being said, TMo and Sprint are making TMo sites advertise an old Sprint network identifier to Sprint phones, so that Sprint phones don't even think of it as roaming [1]. This is in effect for data only right now, not VoLTE.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Sprint/comments/96lai0/clearwire_b2...

I'm saying their agreements are not equivalent to being on the other carrier because they might not help you in the particular time/place/type/amount of roaming you're interested in. Hence claiming it's all LTE because of the existence of roaming and non-existence of SIM/band compatibility issues with recent phones still paints the wrong picture that carrier doesn't affect where you get reception, whereas it very much does.

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