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Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

>"What worse combination of technology can you have than being on Sprint’s network and CDMA?"

Please explain why CDMA is so bad. Your post is devoid of any technical details for such an assertion. CDMA has a number of advantages over GSM that informed Verizon decision to go with it in the first place. Advantages of CDMA include operating very well in noisy environments, soft hand offs, and better spectrum utilization(frequency hopping)which allowed unlimited subscribers per cell.

Verizon, who as much as I dislike them as a company has one the best networks in the US in terms of both call quality and coverage.

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And Verizon is shutting down their CDMA network at the end of the year. It's an old technology that is being sunsetted. The problem with Sprint is that they are still relying on it for far too much (and they don't have broad enough spectrum holdings to make dual networks work well).

Additionally, a lot of Sprint's rural coverage relies on Verizon CDMA roaming -- which will be going away as Verizon sunsets their network.

>The problem with Sprint is that they are still relying on it for far too much (and they don't have broad enough spectrum holdings to make dual networks work well)."

Sprint has a crazy amount of 2.5GHZ spectrum holdings. They are already deploying that with Massive MIMO to move everything to LTE Advanced.

> Sprint has a crazy amount of 2.5GHZ spectrum holdings.

Which gets stopped by walls and wet leaves. It's great if you're in line of sight of a tower and own a device that supports HPUA (high-powered uplink).

If both aren't true your experience will be less than optimal as the phone will have to fall back to band 25 and band 26 LTE which still isn't being provisioned on 15mhz or 20mhz. This means the fallback frequencies will congest easier. In most markets because Sprint either lacks the spectrum to go wideband or needs to use it for legacy CDMA2k since they only support voLTE on like 4 high-end phone models.....

>"Which gets stopped by walls and wet leaves. It's great if you're in line of sight of a tower and own a device that supports HPUA (high-powered uplink)."

Which is why they are combining it with their 800MHZ spectrum from the old Nextel iDEN service. 800MHZ can pretty much punch through anything.

They do not use carrier aggregation between band 25/26 and 41.

There is not enough spectrum to run band 26 on more than 5mhz in most markets. This means it is slow and congests easily. The rest is used to support CDMA2k clients. As the parent post said, they don't have enough spectrum to run a proper dual network.

The stopgap solution at this time is to get a Magicbox[1] from sprint that will grab band 41 signals from outside and relay it as a new tower on band 25 or 26. Then the phone will just fall back onto 1X for calls.

[1]https://business.sprint.com/magic-box/

I didn't say they used carrier aggregation. All of their macro cells are going to be converted to tri-band - 800MHz, 1.9GHz and 2.5GHz.

That, and they haven't rolled out band 41 in most of there service area.

Yes, they are deploying LTE in that spectrum, not CDMA.

But you’re also stuck with a phone that doesn’t work anywhere else. When you get into the boondocks when you are downgraded from their LTE network to their CDMA network you get much slower data than when you are downgraded from LTE to GSM.

CDMA networks are going away. As I pointed in another comment Verizon(the largest CDMA carrier) is sunsetting their CDMA network at this end of this year and aren't even allowing activation of CDMA only phones. There won't be any 3G to be downgraded to.

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