Re: T-Mobile Sprint Merger: Say goodbye to scam calls

On 8/4/2020 11:03 PM, JF Mezei wrote:

<snip>

> Considering T-Mobile won't shutdown CDMA till early next year at
> learliest, I suspect the current arrangement continues till then.  The
> faster T-Mo converts Sprint customers to GSM-only, the less CDMA it
> needs to buy from Verizon.

Well obviously the CDMA roaming from Sprint onto Verizon CDMA can't 
continue once Verizon shuts down CDMA. But there is also Sprint roaming 
onto Verizon LTE. That's something that T-Mobile obviously doesn't want 
to keep paying for, at least in areas where both T-Mobile and Verizon 
have coverage.

> But once T-Nio is a single network with LTE for both voice and data, it
> can shop around for which of AT&T or Verizon it gets its LTE from. I
> beleive it has FCC mandate to get some from AT&T, but what if Verizon
> offers better price?

The FCC thing was regarding T-Mobile's complaint that they were being 
charged too much for roaming by the other carriers. The contention by 
AT&T and Verizon was that it cost them a lot of money to put in all that 
coverage in sparsely populated areas and that they should not be 
required to provide that coverage to competitors at low cost.

> This is where monopolistic behaviour comes in. Verizon may prefer to
> lose the roaming revenue so it can market its better coverage nobody
> else has.

Perhaps, but for now the roaming agreements Sprint had with Verizon are 
still in existence. While the LTE roaming is less than the CDMA roaming, 
you can still see a large amount of LTE roaming onto Verizon as well. 
It's not unlimited roaming and Sprint has all sorts of language warning 
users about excessive roaming 
<https://www.sprint.com/en/support/solutions/connectivity/learn-more-about-data-roaming.html>:

"• Roaming service is offered as a convenience so you can gain access to 
data networks in situations when you are temporarily out of reach of the 
Sprint network.

• Please note that it is not Sprint's intention to have roaming be the 
primary source of your coverage."

If T-Mobile's goal is to retain a large percentage of the Sprint 
customers that it acquired then they'll need to tread carefully. While 
Sprint's native footprint was much smaller than T-Mobile's, their total 
coverage (for postpaid) was actually much larger than T-Mobile's, thanks 
to extensive roaming onto Verizon, and that coverage was in a lot of 
areas where T-Mobile has no native coverage to replace Verizon coverage.

An example I'm familiar with in my area is 95140. Go to 
<https://coverage.sprint.com/coveragemap?>, put in that Zip Code and 
toggle between Voice and Data. You can see all the LTE roaming and the 
greater amount of voice roaming. If you look at that same area on the 
T-Mobile map <https://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/coverage-map> you can 
see that the LTE and voice roaming that a Sprint user has access to is 
clearly NOT on T-Mobile. If you then go to 
<https://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/lte-comparison-map> and switch 
between T-Mobile and Verizon, you can see the vast advantage in coverage 
that Verizon has. This Zip code is a low populated area partly in 
eastern San Jose and partly in unincorporated western Stanislaus County, 
along CA State Road 130. It's not a route many people would use by car 
because of how windy (wine-dee) and steep it is (unless you're driving 
up to the observatory at the top) it is but it's very popular among 
cyclists.

95140 is just one example. try 94074 in 
<https://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/lte-comparison-map> and 
<https://coverage.sprint.com/coveragemap?> as well. All those areas with 
no T-Mobile coverage currently get Verizon roaming on Sprint. The Bay 
Area is really a place where you want to have Verizon best case and AT&T 
worst case, if you ever go to the less populated parts of the counties. 
It would be highly unlikely to find an area with T-Mobile or Sprint 
native coverage that did not have Verizon coverage, though if you looked 
hard enough you might find somewhere that this is the case.

The reference to the WhistleOut web site, regarding coverage, was 
especially amusing and revealing. If you look at it, you quickly see 
that it was not a survey at all, it was just based on the carrier 
provided maps. They listed the "Percentage of Geographic Area Covered" 
with the disclaimer "Coverage data generated August 2019 from carrier 
maps." It's not like they went out and surveyed tens of thousands of 
users like Consumer Reports, J.D. Power, and Yankee Group have done.