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Comment by andy800 | Hacker News Reader

Sprint went all-in on WiMax as it's 4G network. I owned an early Sprint 4G smartphone (made by HTC) and the 4G never worked. I would go to the Sprint store and ask to show me a signal with 4G turned on, and they would always blame congestion, or weather, or some other made-up excuse.

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Was it more about the device than the network? I used mobile WiMax from Clear for years until it ended its service. For what it was, it worked great. It wasn't necessarily a speed demon, but it was reliable. I used it to avoid public WiFi congestion, as a backup when my home network was down, and in 'bring your own infrastructure' situations.

I had a clear hotspot puck in the DMV area, worked well most of the time. I don't think I had any issues with price paid vs performance given the current state of tech at the time. I think targeting homes was just a hard battle, FIOS and others were really ramping up their initial push into fiber and it was just not going to compete sadly.

That's possible but it was a Sprint-branded device bought from Sprint that was clearly supposed to be compatible with its new 4G network. And they charged an extra $10 4G access fee every month!

The other bonus was that being a CDMA device, there was no connectivity when traveling internationally, and no option to buy a local SIM card. Wifi only.

Why does that exclude international use?

Because just about every other country is on a GSM network, not CDMA.

Yeah it depends on the market you were in. I helped build the WiMax network but it was built very quickly and in places it was built by people who didn't care very much.

It was all microwave back hauled so rain fade in stormy weather was absolutely a thing. Most of those were FCC licensed or should have been but I know of at least 1 market where they just never filed the paperwork to get the licenses and built it anyway.

The clearwire side of things was wildly oversubscribed on backhaul, often totally saturated 10m circuits.

I think the only place I knew where WiMAX actually worked properly was in Japan.

in all fairness, the 5G isn't much better these days, at least in my area. T-mobile seem to have inhereted Sprints bad coverage, to the point where they had to send me a booster modem for my own home.

5g is higher frequency, lower wavelength. That means it gets better potential speeds when it does work, but it's going to have more difficulty penetrating barriers, reaching longer distances, do worse in inclement weather, and so on. This is also a fundamental limitation of trying to reach higher speeds with this form of tech, because frequency and wavelength are inversely proportional. The point of this being that 5g is inherently less reliable/robust than 4g, and so it's not too surprising that you'd need a booster, especially if 4g in an area is not the hottest.

At this point telcos are also deploying 5G to old bands, so the assumption that 5G is 3.5GHz and mmW only no longer holds.

In my part of the world I see 5G on 1800MHz and 2100MHz bands in addition to the 3.5GHz one.

Unfortunately that's not done near my home, so I get 1-2bars of 5G, instead of the full bars I see at the office and elsewhere in town.

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