Not surprising. T-Mobile has always been a GSM network, CDMA is what they inherited from Sprint.
While T-Mobile gave Boost nearly double the required time, Boost complained that it wasn't enough and regulators don't like the idea of customers losing access. T-Mobile delayed the shutdown for three months to quell the situation.
Dish is notoriously cheap. They're supposed to be building out their own 5G network, but it's looking like they don't want to spend the money to do that. Dish has also been losing the wireless customers it acquired and so they might be souring a bit on the business.
In Boost's case, they might legally have to. Dish bought Boost as part of T-Mobile's deal to buy Sprint. I don't remember all the specifics of the agreement or what was committed to in terms of non-VoLTE Boost customers. T-Mobile had to give Dish 6 months notice before shutting down the CDMA network and they gave 14-months (now 17 months with the 3-month delay). I don't know if Dish committed to upgrading those customers as part of the deal (I know that it's their responsibility, but I don't know if they're required to upgrade them or if they can just wave goodbye to customers that don't want to migrate).
Ultimately, I think Dish is at least informally required. Dish is likely going to be looking for goodwill from regulators in the coming years. They have major build-out requirements coming due soon and they don't seem to have made much progress - and they have licenses worth tens of billions at stake (worth more than the company's market cap). Angering regulators at this point isn't a great move for Dish.
The CPUC says T-Mobile representatives lied under oath. They claimed that Dish would have until 2023 to migrate customers off of the CDMA network. T-Mobile is facing sanctions because of it:
https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M398/K955/...
Not a long read.
I tried poking around here[1], but CPUC public discoverability is up there with the worst of enterprise...never mind that a decision/resolution/ruling/general order all sound roughly asymptotic to a non-lawyer.
I read it months ago from the curated news mix on https://prepaidcompare.net/
The pair of articles I recal were originally from fiercewireless.
No RSS feeds I'm afraid, you'll have to scrape the site to make your own.
It's kind of amazing to watch them keep pushing out half-baked protocols with the details on what phones actually support being so hard to find. I guess the lesson they learned from rolling out LTE phones with no Voice over LTE support is that nobody really cares, which is why they repeated the same issues with 5G and there's all this stuff about "non-standalone 5G".
Not mention the actual VoLTE standard came at a slightly later date than LTE itself.
Whitelisting Smartphones by US Carriers is another story.
I'm not sure if this was just an Android problem and Google totally dropped the ball, but I cannot understand why there isn't a central database that gets pinged for VoLTE settings dynamically and the phone uses that. Instead, it seems to be need to be shipped in the OS.
iOS is totally fine; but this has totally killed adoption on Android. It's improved recently at least in the UK (last two phones worked out of the box), but previous to that it was a total farce.
The Nexus 6 was the first Nexus/Pixel device to support VoLTE (I seem to vaguely recall the 5 was capable of VoLTE, but no carrier enabled it?), and the iPhone 6 was the first iPhone to do so.
I think you'd be very hard pressed to find a 4G phone that doesn't support VoLTE.
GSMarena usually has the most extensive specifications, however, if you're looking to check a specific phone.
But it's just as hard to find information about various 5G features and those differ a lot by device and service.
This kind of thing should be on the same page as the list of radio frequencies.
This is the big problem, the FCC is far to lax with allowing the big wireless carriers to buy and hold spectrum for years (in some cases decades) never using it for anything just so no one else uses it either
There are plenty of sites that publish news about cellular carriers. It's a technical pursuit like any other. You can assign someone to read Microsoft press releases all day, and they won't ever become an expert Windows programmer... You won't be able to become an expert on a company with a crash program, either, years of accumulated knowledge and subject matter experience and interest count for a lot.
> know so much detail about some specific company.
The three major US cellular carriers hold a great deal of power over all of us. It's something people keep informed about. No doubt around here quite a few people's livelihoods are dependent on keeping abreast of cellular technology as well, providing extra motivation.
You basically had to maintain some level of cognitive dissonance to sell these companies on Sprint service because we all knew it would never work.
Did they ever even build out a 4G network? Some years back I was a regular on Howard Forums[0], and I recall from discussions there that Dish had sat on some big chunks of spectrum for years and never built out a network with it, even back when 4G LTE was the latest and greatest. I guess nothing has changed.
[0] https://howardforums.com/ <-- discussions and flamewars about cellular service
This seems like good news. I'm glad that starting with LTE all the carriers started agreeing on a single platform with SIM cards. Even though there are little nuances between each carrier, the fact that you can buy a single phone and have it work with the four (three now) major carriers is a big deal.
Is that true? If not, then why are they pushing physical SIM cards so hard?
For example, let's say that you're an AT&T customer and AT&T has 700MHz, 850MHz, 1900MHz, 1700MHz, and 2300MHz spectrum. You buy some foreign phone that supports 1900MHz. Great, now you're running a device that won't have coverage everywhere that AT&T has coverage. You're running a device that won't be using the full AT&T network and your speeds will be really slow compared to devices that fully support the network. You go somewhere with friends and you're like, "AT&T never works when I leave <city-name>!" Except that AT&T isn't the problem - you're the problem. You complain that your device is always slow and how AT&T is crap - but it's your device that's the problem.
Semi-compatible devices are just terrible for network operators. Let's say that AT&T wants to move that 1900MHz spectrum to 5G - but now you have a device that will stop working. Do they need to reach out to you? Do they need to offer you an upgrade? Sure, you and 90% of people would be like, "I knew what I was getting in for and it's my problem." But omg the 10% of people that will yell and scream and the meetings you'll need to have with regulators and the delays in your plans and the free devices you'll offer them as part of a settlement and all the mailings and admin.
Offering tech support isn't cheap and it's more expensive when you're dealing with random crap from users. Now you have some rep on the phone who doesn't totally know what they're talking about trying to figure out why they're getting bad coverage on their kid's device while their device has good coverage. They don't want to hear, "well, you shouldn't have bought some POS off Amazon that isn't even meant for the US market." They're going to say that it's a compatible phone - compatible being a black/white issue, not something that's only partly compatible and will technically get coverage 80% of the time, but even then won't be able to use most of the network.
Part of it is a cultural thing. Americans are willing to accept that companies are evil and don't allow something. You'll go online and say, "how is this legal" and then go back to your life and the company has spent no money on you. But once something is allowed, there's no concept of "we'll allow this, but you're on your own if anything goes wrong and we'll charge your account $100 if you call us for support." Once you've been accepted as a paying customer, you (and by you, I mean at least 10% of the people who will do that) will demand the same premium service for your dollar.
"AT&T only allows certain phones." Ok, companies are crap, but we're all used to that. If they allow you to put a crappy device on their network, there's so much bad word of mouth, regulator crap, support complaints, etc. I'm not saying the world should be this way, but it certainly is.
So many restrictions that exist are there because the company loses almost nothing from the restriction while the pain in the ass they receive from not having that restriction simply isn't worth it. Keep that in mind when thinking about why companies do things that seem to have no benefit. A bunch of people were likely a complete pain in the ass over something that was the customer's fault, but that the company ultimately had to deal with.
And I think the big area is foreign phones. Phones made for the US that have the right network support for the carrier are good to have. Someone grabs a Galaxy A32 meant for non-US markets (rather than the A32 5G) and it doesn't support bands 12/13/17 which are the main coverage bands for T-Mobile/Verizon/AT&T. It does support bands 2 and 5 and AT&T and Verizon probably have ok coverage in cities with band 2, but in-building coverage will be worse and speeds will be slow. I think they have some band 5 LTE, but they weren't necessarily anticipating that being one of the bands customers would really be relying on. And now there's an angry customer, spreading their anger to their friends, tying up support resources and costing you money, using your network inefficiently, and demanding that the carrier fix the situation and the only way you can fix the situation is basically by giving them a free phone.
In terms of how it's legal, spectrum licenses didn't come with open access requirements. The one exception was Verizon's 700MHz licenses. Except that Verizon kinda redefined open-access to mean that they wouldn't lock their phones - not that you could use any phone you wanted on their network. Google had pushed for the open access requirements, but a decade later Google didn't care and regulators didn't care.
"Hi, this is a free SMS from AT&T. We noticed you're trying to use a Galaxy A32 phone on our network. Unfortunately this phone doesn't support some of our bands (12/13/17), so you might experience poor or no coverage in some situations. We recommend you upgrade your phone, otherwise you might run into issues. If you have any questions, please call our representatives at 1-800-288-2020."
You'd think they could automatically annotate these accounts with a little note for the next customer service rep so they're aware of this possible issue if the customer calls. Then users won't be confused as to why their coverage is poor, but they can still use their devices if they really want to.
Why is it so hard for companies to communicate honestly and openly? Why do they prefer to let others stay in the dark and make problems 10x harder for everyone instead? Isn't it kind of unreasonable to expect customers to be "understanding" of problems when they don't put in an honest effort into helping them understand the problems?
Now you have to have a database of a million phones from Shenzhen that you need to keep track of whether it has your bands. Who's gonna pay for their QA and know what phone manufacturers are doing what with their phones?
This caused endless headaches for users and tech support alike because the market was flooded with phones that might have 850MHz support. There is no way to tell from the model or serial number - even Samsung and Nokia often failed to properly indicate that in their specs. And because both networks were also on 2100MHz, a phone may appear to work fine for months, but you will find out the hard way when reception completely disappears in a slightly remote area. There was also no GSM to fall back to since they built it from the ground up with no 2G layer.
Legend has it that one intrepid phone reseller would routinely take his stock on a boat to a spot 15km away from the nearest shore where no 2100MHz signal could reach, and only there could one be sure that the reception you are getting is on the 850MHz band.
I literally have no idea if I’ve ever been this customer and have no way of finding out from anyone who’s ever sold me a phone. They didn’t tell me information like this when I bought a random handset from Cingular at their store, or when I bought an iPhone directly from Apple.
Isn't this similar to the pre-iPhone days, when if you brought an overseas GSM phone you had to go through some hoops to get it activated with Cingular/T-Mobile? I remember getting handsets from China and Europe and the reseller would have to circumvent something to get it activated on the networks.
On the other hand, some handsets that are blatantly missing LTE bands are on the whitelist, such as the Chinese Oneplus 8T.
To be frank: No. You popped your SIM in and the phone worked immediately on the network. If it didn't work you manually entered APN settings in.
Some years later AT&T started maintaining a whitelist of smartphone IMEI numbers so they could charge more for data plans than a featurephone would pay. T-Mobile did not do this. AT&T went as far as maintaining whitelisting for phones that would be allowed on wifi calling or voLTE, T-Mobile phones just needed to carry the profiles.
No 'circumvention' other than carrier/subsidy unlock was ever required to use an international phone save for the very rare times international phones had bands software disabled (and this is quite rare).
As for my daughter, she was under the impression that she had until February of 2022 to replace her phone, but it was disconnected five months earlier than anticipated. I'm now with T-Mobile and satisfied. For my location it has better coverage than AT&T did, is significantly faster, and I have unlimited data.
Furthermore, what they're specifically referring to here is Sprint's 3G network. Sprint's 4G LTE network is currently planned to be de-commissioned on June 30 2022, but that will almost certainly get pushed as well.
... and MetroPCS, of which they efficiently staked that CDMA dead years ago now.