Da-Banana

I want to explain some of the few details behind what makes a carrier a carrier and how the perception of connection changes based on different factors. These factors often depend on resources that are limited and largely owned by the bigger corporations. To start, I will need to give brief overview on how you connect to a carrier like AT&T or T-Mobile. They each own certain amount of airwaves known as spectrum, much like a TV station or radio broadcast. Each carrier can only then broadcast over spectrum that each of them own. And spectrum for cellular carriers is a very limited resource. The original spectrum to go up for sale was bought up by many different regional carriers. Most of these carriers have now been swallowed up by either AT&T or Verizon, who own the majority of the available low band spectrum. What is low band spectrum versus the high band? Well, low band spectrum can reach much further distances, and penetrate walls much better than high band, but hig...

It is fun to go back and review how things have changed over the years. Lets take a look at T-Mobile my carrier of choice due to their focus on improving the customer experience. Back in 2012 they had a major problem. They were losing customers and had a failed merger with AT&T. They were now in a rough spot with everyone wanting LTE and T-Mobile had none. In comes John Legere in fall of 2012 with big plans for the carrier to bring LTE to the carrier, get the iPhone and do things that other carriers won't. Below is a chart for T-Mobile refarming plan. Since they didn't have any open spectrum to deploy LTE to like Verizon or AT&T from the 700Mhz Auction, they needed to find space in their current spectrum. AWS was the clear best choice for deployment which currently housed their HSPA+ network. After this rollout was complete it would get LTE onto all the current AWS towers along with the current HSPA+.  By the end of 2013 T-Mobile had a decent LTE footprin...

Most people, when they think about phones, think about a carrier. That's because almost everyone phone currently on the market only work on one carrier and has all sorts of influence on the phone from the carrier. These are mostly geared towards things working out better for the carrier than the customer. The big exception to this rule is the iPhones, as they are carrier independent, have no bloat or changes specific to a carrier. No features integrated into the device that talks back to the carrier saying when you activated certain features, like tethering. In buying their phones, you also get stuck with all their apps and services they are pushing, which usually means they force out competitive items, for instance, Verizon blocked Google Wallet from there Galaxy Nexus because it competed against their Softcard service. On top of that, each carrier get special made phones for their network, that has hardware that works on just their network, meaning that if you want to ...