1 edit | Sprint's pricing plans don't matter. Verizon has Friends and Family, AT&T has A-List. Unlimited calls to up to 10 numbers on family plans. Add your 10 most dialed numbers (cell OR landline) and after that you still have plenty of minutes left. Sprint has been pushing their lower priced plans for years, and the result? Still hemorrhaging customers. It's clear that lower prices aren't helping.
Wait until LTE comes around. While AT&T and Verizon will be able to roam off eachother Sprint will be a one-man team with WiMAX. He thinks things are looking up? Just wait. This company will be bankrupt. |
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| By the time AT&T and Verizon have roam, WiMAX will already fully deployed. I don't see AT&T will start LTM before 2011. |
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iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO
kudos:2 Reviews:
 ·Comcast
| reply to ravensfan55
How many people do you call who have landlines? How many of them do you talk to for long periods of time?
I'd say that 70% of my minutes are spent talking to other cell phones. So if I had Any Mobile Any Time I'd effectively have a 1500 minute plan for $70 including "the works."
Also, Verizon and AT&T have only five numbers on their "unlimited calling to/from" plans, and you don't get this feature on their lower-tier single-line and family plans where it would actually make a big difference in minute use.
As for LTE vs. WiMAX and roaming, by your logic AT&T would be out of business, because they're the only operator in the US with an 850/1900 HSPA network. Funny, they're still around...and will probably be on HSPA for another 3-4 years. Not that it matters much anyway; Verizon and AT&T's footprints cover mostly the same areas, though Verizon covers more ground thanks to the Alltel purchase. |
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| HSPA has a much longer lifespan than CDMA/EVDO. Why are Verizon and Sprint rushing to get 4G out? Because EVDO Rev. A is the end of the line for the CDMA family. Rev. A maxes around 3.1mbps, while there are current 21mbps HSPA networks and it has the capability to peak around 42mbps.
So does AT&T need LTE bad? No. But when 3G starts getting phased out, you're going to have ~95% of the country covered in LTE between Verizon and AT&T on the 700mhz block, and Sprint will have their WiMax sitting on 2.5GHz spectrum, which not only has bad distance reach but has crappy building penetration.
WiMAX is good technology for mobile broadband, but it isn't made to be deployed on a nationwide scale in a country as big as the US. |
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iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Golden, CO
kudos:2 Reviews:
·Comcast
| I totally agree that EvDO Rev. A is a dead end at this point. However it's a much more reliable/speedy dead end than the "evolving" HSPA 3.6 or 7.2. Which is the only thing AT&T is rolling out right now. T-Mobile is doing 21 Mbps HSPA+, true, but that's T-Mobile's take on 4G at this point. Compared with the competition, that's how the tech fits in.
About LTE, I'll pass judgment when a network gets on the ground. WiMAX is here, provides up to 15/5 speeds and works well in both fixed and mobile situations. It will also be built into more CE stuff than LTE because its an IEEE standard rather than a 3GPP one. There are more WiFi-equipped device models than CDMA and GSM ones, combined.
One other thing about WiMAX int he US: there's TONS of spectrum to play around with. Contrast this with LTE, which has a limited frequency range. This makes WiMAX good for terrestrial broadband/WiFi (2.4 GHz) alternatives, and LTE good for "data card" use cases, where a rovider offers a service that doesn't require a large antenna for rural reception but can't be used more than a few GB per month.
All that said, the real question for 4G techs is how you're going to bring bandwidth to the towers. a 100 Mbps connectio to the tower does me very little good if it's 2 Mbps to the internet. Sure, LAN parties would be sweet but that's about it.
I'd love to be proved wrong with WiFiOS from Verizon, but I doubt that'll happen. |
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| reply to ravensfan55
Verizon may have 10 whole friends and family members to contact but Sprint has the anymobile anytime so they have 250 million people you can contact. Hmmmm 10 or 250 million. You do the match - so a lesser price plan and 250 million people to contact and then you use your mins for landlines. I mean come on, how many people really have landlines anymore, the majority of calls are to cell phones and then your minutes can cover those. I dont know about you but I like being able to talk to 250 million people if I ever met that many rather than just 10. So I will save atleast 200.00 per year and you can give your extra 200.00 to the employees at verizon. You and your 10 people enjoy talking to each other only and I will enjoy talking to everyone else and saving money each month over you also. Verizon is atleast 30 -40 dollars more per month than sprint. WOW 10 PEOPLE - OOOHHHH FUN!!! |
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