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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

Too bad their coverage in smaller cities and rural areas is still pretty bad.

This is less and less true. TMobile has rolled out 600mhz 5g on the old Nextel push to talk frequencies it acquired in the Sprint merger. Rural coverage is vastly improved, like far far exceeding the other two.

At least in areas where Nextel had a serious presence.

iDEN was 800MHz, the 600MHz stuff is UHF spectrum from when all the OTA television channels went digital.

Where can I learn more about frequencies and towers, by vendor,in my region?

cellmapper.net

Yeah, I’ve been quite happy with T-Mobile as my personal carrier for the last 7 years or so. Up until recently I had an AT&T phone for work, but the new company is T-Mobile. I’m on the road a lot didn’t realize how much I took for granted with AT&T tethering speeds. Even in greater LA area, the tethering seems markedly worse with T-Mobile (N=1).

T-Mobile uses deep packet inspection to kill VPNs with TCP RST packets and has arrangements with Android to throttle tethering to hell.

The solution is only use TCP networking (UDP transit is intentionally FUBAR) and EasyTether Pro on stock Android.

Out in the sticks of Arkansas, my iPhone 12 popped up a 5G signal a few days ago. Have no idea where that tower could possibly be. Going to be sending the drone to scout it soon. Were on Verizon, but have switched to Ting, which does use Verizon towers. Could they be showing 4G services as 5G?

Nah.. only AT&T does that :P

Ting will be using ATT soon as part of the Dish deal.

Hope not. I'll have to drop them if so, as ATT has no service where I am. I was told Ting operates off of either one, and you can choose.

I want to buy a Sony Xperia unlocked so I might be in your boat too.

100% FALSE

Check 4G coverage with cellmapper.net

Make sure your phone supports Band 71 - it's everywhere nowadays - and band lock your modem to band 41 for crazy speeds in congested metro areas.

As someone with both Verizon and T-Mobile on the same phone using dual-SIM, I can confirm that T-Mobile's coverage is worse than Verizon.

Indisputable. Everyone knows T-Mobile has worse coverage than Verizon. But not everyone knows just how much improvement has been made in the last 5 years, especially due to Band 71 coming online in most places.

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