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Say a Final Goodbye to Sprint – T-Mobile Is Reportedly Shutting It Down
- Baljhin 3y ago> T-Mobile merged with Spring on April 1, 2020, and has been chiseling away at Sprint products & services ever since. The plan was always to envelop Sprint’s customers into the T-Mobile brand and now the final stages have been scheduled.
- breu 3y agoWhat happened to copy editors? It seems like half of every article I read online has some grammatical error
- jnwatson 3y agoBecause most “journalism” is just a person working from a coffee shop now. At least it was written by a human…
- ekianjo 3y agoso GPT would be an improvement then
- Paul-Craft 3y agoUnless you want, you know, accurate facts in your news.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoEven then, ChatGPT might not be worse than a journalist.
- dragonwriter 3y agoGrammatically and typographically, yes; factually, probably not.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fortyseven 3y agoI've had an LLM generate a typo before. Definitely not a metric to gauge by.
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago[dead]
- sacnoradhq 3y agoIIRC, wasn't the low-cost carrier MetroPCS also acquired by T-Mobile? Seems like oligopoly and higher prices are on the horizon. Americans pay way, way more than European consumers do for the same/worse service.
- whitemary 3y ago[flagged]
- thebigjewbowski 3y agoMaybe tongue in cheek but that’s not exactly accurate — the government auctions off operating bands and the FCC enforces it. Not like we could enter into the space today by buying antennas, mounting them to your garage and setting up some services.
- galleywest200 3y agoMint Mobile as well.
- lockhouse 3y agoIt’s not an apples to apples comparison. Europe is much more population dense than North America so I suspect being a cell phone carrier in Europe is a less costly venture.
- LordShredda 3y agoIt's not the customer's fault these monopolies own more than what they can financially manage.
- nerdbert 3y agoExcept that prices are also lower (and service is much better) in huge, sparsely populated countries with far-flung rural communities like Norway, which has fewer than half as many people per km2.
- 3y ago
- arnon 3y agoMakes sense as the cost of running two operators' networks is insane overhead
- listenallyall 3y agoAnyone remember way before cell phones, when Sprint was just a long-distance provider like MCI? They rolled out fiber optic lines, the idea was that fiber optics were so perfect you could hear a pin drop over the phone. https://youtu.be/k4dIDl8sjJk https://youtu.be/k4dIDl8sjJk
- gymbeaux 3y agoIs that why their logo animation sort of looks like a pin dropping?
- csense 3y agoSprint converted their telephone network from analog to digital in the 1980's and 1990's. They heavily advertised this, as "being able to hear a pin drop over the phone." A quick Youtube search gives this commercial [1] from 1987. In another commercial [2] from 1998 the outro still shows a pin dropping, and now the phone number is 1-800-PIN-DROP [3] [4]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4dIDl8sjJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4dIDl8sjJk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O816Z42NSts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O816Z42NSts [3] Some younger readers may be confused about what is being advertised. For a long time, the first three digits of a 10-digit phone number were an "area code", they literally divided up the country into chunks by population. Calling people in the same chunk was free and unlimited, but calling someone in another chunk would cost money. If you were calling someone in the US but more than a hundred miles or so away, you'd literally get a bill for every minute you spent on the phone. The 1998 advertisement is informing customers that Sprint only charges $0.10 per minute, and you get 200 minutes free. [4] Some younger readers may also be confused about 1-800-PIN-DROP. It's a phone number, but it expects people to know that a classic phone keypad or dial has letters for each number (2=ABC, 3=DEF, 4=GHI, 5=JKL, 6=MNO, 7=PQRS, 8=TUV, 9=WXYZ). So you'd change the letters PIN-DROP to 746-3767.
- Clamchop 3y agoOn the topic of 800 numbers with words, there used to be a satellite TV service called Primestar and they advertised their number as 1-800-PRIMESTAR, which is too long, man. I think I've seen this elsewhere since but the memory of this particular one sticks out. Excess numbers are ignored, so it's the same as dialing 1-800-PRIMEST. Confusing!
- thedanbob 3y agoI miss Sprint. Their network had the best service in my area, and Tello (NVMO formerly using the Sprint network) was the cheapest I could find. Win-win! Now I have to pay more for worse service.
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoIsn't T-Mobile using Sprint's coverage? I know our area is now covered by T-Mobile, using the frequency that used to be Sprint's.
- thedanbob 3y agoThey don’t seem to be here. My wife is still on Tello and her phone doesn’t get the same reception as before.
- TheJoeMan 3y agoOne aspect I don't see discussed as much is the shutting down of the infrastructure used for the IoT. 3G/4G/5G/etc. were all pitched as revolutionizing connections for more than just cell phones. But these devices, such as refrigerated truck remote monitoring, older vehicle OnStar, many depend on 3G. This is going hand-in-hand with browsers increasingly putting up roadblocks to configuring said IoT devices. Guess what? The tiny device setup webserver on my low power embedded device isn't going to be able to https sorry. So now you have to dismiss more and more warning dialogs.
- gymbeaux 3y agoMy conspiracy theory is that cell carriers knew IoT was DOA but wanted to get as much funding from the federal government as possible. I suspect this because of how eager they are to deprecate old networks to repurpose the spectrum for high-revenue “premium 5G” devices like smartwatches and cars with built in hotspots… and because of how difficult it was for me to actually get an IoT device on one of the networks. Verizon basically said “fuck off unless you’re an enterprise company”, T-Mobile said something similar, and AT&T was pricey (they were all probably pricey)- something like $10 for 1MB/month. Like come the fuck on, it costs less than a cent to transfer 1MB of data over your decrepit EDGE network. Is the Helium network a viable replacement for IoT devices? It’s a crypto thing but you earn the crypto by hosting a Helium “hotspot”, which is a LoRa (915MHz in the US) radio that actually has decent coverage and building penetration- of course the speeds are comparable dial-up, but that should suffice for IoT.
- ThatPlayer 3y agoCan Helium compete with Amazon's Sidewalk (also LoRa) though? Democratizing the network is nice, but when the hardware costs so much, I'm not sure they can build the network fast enough compared to Amazon building it into Echo devices everywhere. Also Helium doesn't let me use my own LoRa radios, so I'm not even sure I consider that democratizing it. It still feels like it's a network that belongs to Helium rather than individuals
- gymbeaux 3y ago
- tamade 3y agoAlways found T-Mobile to be an odd brand for the US market since Americans still refer to these devices as cell phones rather than mobiles like the rest of the world. Wonder if they considered keeping the Sprint brand instead?
- unstatusthequo 3y agoWhenever I see T-Mobile, my brain thinks T-Minus XX days until another reported breach. Can’t be coincidence, can it?