As expected, the Department of Justice made an announcement today approving a merger between Sprint and T-Mobile. While the merger isn’t officially closed, DOJ approval was the largest hurdle T-Mobile and Sprint needed to jump before making their merger a reality. As far as I can tell, the terms of the merger were consistent with […]
People buy a lot of shit they don’t need to impress other people. The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” often has a negative connotation. I’m not sure that’s entirely fair. People care a lot about their social status. Status is helpful for everything from getting jobs to finding romantic partners. Like it or not, […]
Yesterday, RootMetrics released its report on mobile network performance in the first half of 2019. Here are the overall, national scores for each network: Verizon – 94.8 points AT&T – 93.2 points T-Mobile – 86.9 points Sprint – 86.7 points While Verizon was the overall winner, AT&T wasn’t too far behind. T-Mobile came in a […]
Opensignal just released a new report on the performance of U.S. wireless networks. The report ranks major U.S. networks in five categories based on crowdsourced data: 4G availability Video experience Download speed experience Upload speed experience Latency experience Verizon took the top spot for 4G availability and video experience. T-Mobile came out on top for […]
Added 2/18/2020: Ting has found a way to continue offering service over T-Mobile’s network going forward. The parts of this post about Ting’s plans to migrate subscribers away from T-Mobile’s network are no longer accurate. Yesterday, it was made public that the mobile virtual network operator Ting will soon cease offering service over T-Mobile’s network […]
Summary On June 20, PCMag published its latest results from performance testing on the major U.S. wireless networks. Surprisingly, AT&T rather than Verizon took the top spot in the overall rankings. I expect this was because PCMag places far more weight on network performance within cities than performance in less-populated areas. In my opinion, PCMag’s […]
Understanding networks’ prioritization policies can be tricky. Recently, I’ve spent some time digging through the major U.S. networks’ policies. I’ve created a web page for each network listing which services I expect to be prioritized and which services I expect not to be prioritized. Making sense of each network’s policies isn’t always easy, so it’s […]
A lot of numbers have been thrown out about how many jobs will be created or destroyed if the proposed merger between Sprint and T-Mobile goes through. Here are a few examples I found on the New T-Mobile website: When dealing with complex systems full of feedback loops, nothing happens in isolation. This fact is […]
I recently purchased a cheap service plan I wanted to trial from SpeedTalk Mobile. During the checkout process, I was shown the following: This clearly violates Google’s guidelines. I also noticed SpeedTalk keyword stuffing in its website’s footer—another questionable strategy: I was pretty excited about SpeedTalk. Not anymore. Alternatives to SpeedTalk If you’re looking for […]
Google Fi uses an admirably simple pricing structure. A base rate of $20 per month offers subscribers unlimited talk and text. Beyond that, users are charged $10 per gigabyte of data. Single-line plans are capped at a monthly charge of $80, so subscribers that use 6GB of data will pay the same monthly price as […]