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 ...

There are a bunch of tablets out there with many variations and options. I made my decision on the Nexus 7 for its price and features. Plus the fact it runs stock Android and gets updates fast made it a clear choice. There are also very few tablets out there with cellular capabilities and the Nexus 7 shines in that category. First off, lets talk about the hardware. With the quad core Snapdragon S4 Pro, it has plenty of performance and the 1080p IPS looks great and is very crisp. The tablet is light and thin making it very easy to take on the go. The main feature this device offers that most tablets lack is cellular connectivity. This tablet offers LTE capabilities to Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. This makes this tablet very useful on the go and not tied down to the home. For T-Mobile and AT&T it also supports there HSPA and Edge networks so you have a very wide range of support. At the price of $350, this offers a price lower than most iPad models that lack cellular ...

I've had my Samsung Galaxy Nexus for over 6 months now and I've realized a few things in that time. First is that the software on the phone, is much more important than the phone hardware. I would rather have Jelly Bean on 1 year old hardware, than Ice Cream Sandwich on the latest phone hardware. This is why the Galaxy Nexus was a good choice for me because with it, I can be on the latest version, though I do have the Sprint version, which does lag a little, but ultimately isn't the reason I moved too Cyanogenmod. I ran Cyanogenmod on my previous phone, the Sprint EVO 4G. That made a huge difference and was much more pleasant than the stock HTC Sense interface which could be slow, though it did have some nice features to it. This time, having the Galaxy Nexus, even though it was the Sprint version, and being stock Android, my desire and need to move to a custom ROM was very small. Ultimately, the reason I moved was for just a few features that I wanted. The first thi...