AT&T plans to cover 200 million people will lowband 5G coverage by mid-2020. LG Electronics pulled out of MWC 2020 (a giant wireless industry conference) due to coronavirus concerns. Web scraping received a significant legal victory in the U.S. An artist created fake traffic jams on Google Maps by pulling along a wagon full of […]
During the Super Bowl, Mint Mobile was offering new customers three months of free service. In my earlier post about the promotion, I said that I thought the deal wouldn’t have any serious catches or gotchas that made it less appealing. Sure enough, that’s how things panned out. I really appreciate that Mint Mobile doesn’t […]
RootMetrics recently tweeted about how its latest analyses prove which networks are the fastest and most reliable: I’m a big fan of RootMetrics, but the tweet annoyed me. There’s a ton of flexibility in how network evaluators can approach their work. Will performance data be crowdsourced from consumers or collected via in-house testing? How will […]
RootMetrics’ most recent report includes information about network speeds in city centers. Here’s how RootMetrics’ describes the tests: The results are presented with the following graphic that lists the median download speed in megabits per second from the fastest and slowest network in each city: Despite Sprint’s lousy performance in RootMetrics’ overall, national-level results, Sprint […]
Yesterday, RootMetrics released its latest report on the performance of U.S. wireless networks. I’d been looking forward to this report. RootMetrics’ drive testing methodology has some advantages over the approaches used by other companies that evaluate network performance. Results RootMetrics’ results were generally unsurprising. As with the last report, Verizon was the big winner, followed […]
This post is the first of hopefully many link roundup posts. Masnick of TechDirt explains how Apple dropped plans to encrypt its customers’ backups after the FBI pushed back on the company’s plans. It seems like there’s a lot of misinformation going on in this situation. Physicist Casey Handmer is extremely optimistic about SpaceX’s Starlink. […]
Mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) often appear to be prohibited (or at least discouraged) from explicitly acknowledging which networks they run over. Still, it seems that most MVNOs don’t have to keep their host networks entirely secret. The effects of these policies can be kind of funny. Red Pocket The MVNO Red Pocket operates over […]
An SEC filing Comcast published today showed that Xfinity Mobile has been adding subscribers quickly. In the last quarter, Xfinity Mobile added 261,000 new lines. Overall, Xfinity Mobile had a net increase of 816,000 lines in 2019, bringing its total subscriber count at the end of the year to slightly over two million lines. It’s […]
Today, Opensignal released a new report on the performance of U.S. wireless networks. The report details results on seven different metrics. Here are the networks that took the top spot for each metric at the national level: Video Experience – Verizon Voice App Experience – T-Mobile/AT&T (draw) Download Speed Experience – AT&T Upload Speed Experience […]
TracFone, the company behind several large MVNOs, appears to be working on a new product called SmartSIM. Apparently, some TracFone customers recently received a marketing email that mentioned SmartSIM. I was briefly able to access NoDeadZone.com, a website that shared some basic information about SmartSIM. Oddly, the website now automatically redirects to locations.totalwireless.com (Total Wireless […]