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

On 8/4/2020 11:03 PM, JF Mezei wrote:
> On 2020-08-05 00:47, nospam wrote:

<snip>

>> for lte, they *can't* roam on each other's networks since the lte bands
>> are different.
> 
> Differeent bands make no difference to roaming. I can go roam in
> Australia or Europe that use different bands than in Canada.

Some people (well one person anyway!) may not understand that roaming 
often occurs on different bands than their own carrier's native bands, 
and that this is normal.

If you look at popular phones, sold in the last five years (and longer), 
you can see that they support a LOT of LTE bands and the manufacturers 
do this so they don't have to qualify a gazillion different models, 
based on what carrier is selling or using the phone

iPhone 6s (2015) :1,2,3,4,5,7,8,12,13,   17,18,19,20,25,26,27,28,29,30, 
     38,39,40,41

iPhone 7 (2016)  :1,2,3,4,5,7,8,12,13,   17,18,19,20,25,26,27,28,29,30, 
     38,39,40,41

iPhone 8 (2017)  :1,2,3,4,5,7,8,12,13,   17,18,19,20,25,26,27,28,29,30, 
  34,38,39,40,41,   66

iPhone Xs (2018) :1,2,3,4,5,7,8,12,13,14,17,18,19,20,25,26, 
29,30,32,34,38,39,40,41,46,66,71

MotoX4 (2018)    :1,2,3,4,5,7,8,12,13,   17,      20,25,26,   28, 
     38,      41,   66

Galaxy S8 (2017) :1,2,3,4,5,7,8,12,13,   17,18,  ,20,25,26,     ,29 
     38,39,40,41,46,66

Galaxy S9,(2018) :1,2,3,4,5,7,8,12,13,14,17,18,19,20,25,26,   28, 
32,   38,39,40,41,46,66,71

Galaxy S10,(2019):1,2,3,4,5,7,8,12,13,14,17,18,19,20,25,26,   28,29,30, 
     38,39,40,41,46,66,71

You can see that even five years ago popular phones had the necessary 
LTE bands to work on all the U.S. carriers and many foreign carriers. As 
carriers added more bands the phone manufacturers added support for 
those new bands.

There are some very low-end phones, often sold by MVNOs, that lack a lot 
of LTE bands, but those MVNOs don't allow roaming anyway, and the phones 
are not unlocked for use on other carriers.

For postpaid, all the carriers have roaming. All four (counting Sprint 
separately) have reciprocal roaming agreements with small rural 
carriers, but Sprint and T-Mobile also have roaming on Verizon and AT&T.

The previous CEO of Sprint, Marcelo Claure, once said, as he was trying 
to reduce roaming on AT&T and Verizon and increase it on rural carriers 
"I don't like writing checks for hundreds of millions of dollars to my 
two biggest competitors." The problem Claure (and Legere) ran into is 
that AT&T and Verizon acquired a lot of the rural carriers (Edge, Golden 
State Cellular, Alltel West Virginia Wireless, Ramcell, Rural Cellular 
Corporation, SureWest Communications, etc.). Of course nothing stopped 
Sprint and T-Mobile from making offers on these rural carriers. Sprint 
did buy Nextel, which was a disaster.