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Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

This is mostly about drama around Boost Mobile. T-Mobile wanted to shut down their CDMA network on January 1, 2022. Boost (now owned by Dish) doesn't want to upgrade users that have handsets that don't work with VoLTE. Upgrading users involves sending them notices, giving them options of free handsets, shipping those handsets, getting the users to actually activate them, etc.

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.

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> T-Mobile gave Boost nearly double the required time, Boost complained that it wasn't enough

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.

The hearing was scheduled for 2021-09-20, over two months ago. Any idea what the outcome was?

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.

[1] https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/

My recommendation for navigating the CPUC for a particular case is to follow the case number (in this case A1807011) via http://subscribecpuc.cpuc.ca.gov/fpss/ (which sends email notifications). The transcript of the 09-20 hearing is at https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M411/K194/... (310 pages), the T-Mobile post-trial brief at https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M417/K418/... (123 pages) and the DISH post-trial brief reply at https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M420/K303/... (47 pages). This last brief was filed November 4th (25 days ago), and there has been no further action by the administrative judge that I've seen.

Thank you for sharing this. This is actual news and I am somewhat dismayed that none of my news feeds picked it up ( I have long given up on dramarama news edition ). I clearly need to made something more custom.

> I am somewhat dismayed that none of my news feeds picked it up

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.

> handsets that don't work with VoLTE

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".

Well VoLTE was the first time the world moved to an IP based Voice Calling Protocol. So it was hard for everybody. VoNR will hopefully be a lot easier.

Not mention the actual VoLTE standard came at a slightly later date than LTE itself.

Whitelisting Smartphones by US Carriers is another story.

VoLTE works fine, its the ridiculous rollout strategy that requires every phone to have specific carrier settings in the firmware. This ends up in ridiculous situations where some phones will work on some carriers with VoLTE, but not others (despite both phone + network supporting VoLTE), depending on what firmware you have.

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.

It might be to find info about VoLTE support because VoLTE phones started coming out seven years ago.

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.

> I think you'd be very hard pressed to find a 4G phone that doesn't support VoLTE.

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.

Who is 'they'?

The carriers along with the phone makers.

VoLTE was complex because it required proper QoS handling, IIRC.

How do you keep tabs on all this stuff? Are you reading press releases? I often wonder how some random person on HN seems to always know so much detail about some specific company. I am also trying to figure out the best way to do a deep dive on a company (any company).

> How do you keep tabs on all this stuff?

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.

Smells a lot like the Nextel -> Sprint transition back when I was working for Sprint. (Similarly Verizon's buyout of Centennial Wireless) I quit after the stress involved with companies coming in to move 200+ nextel phones over at the last minute only to discover that the Sprint network would never give them the same coverage. Plus their push to talk features everyone in the oil field relied on wasn't going to work deep in coastal industrial areas like they were used to due to it moving to a much higher frequency.

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.

> 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.

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

Is that they do not want to pay or is it that the big 3 carriers have bought up wide swaths of spectrum in the "auctions" from the FCC and are just holding them, not using them.

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

Are they legally required to offer replacement phones? Or is it just customer retention?

In general, no they aren't required. However, if we're talking 5% of your customer base, you might not want to lose them.

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.

They’re a pay as you go MVNO so there’s no legal requirement on either end. Might have to deal with the fallout though.

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