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

On 8/4/2020 10:56 AM, badgolferman wrote:

<snip>

> I'm suspicious of coverage maps.  As I mentioned in an earlier message,
> TMO and VZW show the same coverage at my house but VZW signal strength
> must be stronger.  whatever the case I know the VZW cellular connection
> works better than my TMO connection.

In rural areas there's less of using the "bucket fill" on coverage maps. 
For the San Francisco Bay Area the maps are pretty accurate when you get 
into the less populated areas. Sprint does pretty well, for now, because 
they have a great deal of roaming on Verizon, as their map shows. Can't 
imagine that they'll keep all that roaming as the integration of Sprint 
and T-Mobile proceeds, nor is T-Mobile likely to install towers in those 
areas to replicate the lost Verizon roaming coverage. Roaming costs the 
carriers a lot, and it's not like Verizon needs any reciprocal roaming 
with T-Mobile.

T-Mobile has a good coverage comparison tool at 
<https://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/lte-comparison-map>. I put in some 
less-populated areas we go to fairly often, 94074 95389, and 95364. The 
differences between T-Mobile and Verizon are stark. Not having this kind 
or rural coverage may not matter to some people, but it does matter to a 
lot of users. My experiences are more California-centric in general, and 
Bay Area-centric in particular, and it happens that these areas are much 
better covered by AT&T and Verizon for historic reasons.

I guess since Sprint is now part of T-Mobile, T-Mobile left Sprint out 
of the comparison tool. But if you go to 
<https://coverage.sprint.com/coveragemap?> and look at those same areas 
you'll still see vast amounts of Verizon roaming. Sprint had the 
smallest amount of native coverage but they compensated for that with 
vast amounts of Verizon roaming. Back in the days of PRLs (Preferred 
Roaming Lists) some Sprint users loaded PRLs that forced their phone to 
always use Verizon.

I don't know when J.D. Power started using the metric of "Problems per 
100 Mobile Device Interactions" but you can see the stark differences 
between carriers. Verizon does better in every region of the country, 
see 
<https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2019-us-wireless-network-quality-performance-study-volume-1>.