pinniped

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...A2TEVEKQUWGNAV

Here's one for $525 that looks legit to me. (You're right...the ones for $500 flat do seem to be locked to AT&T, although they were showing up in my T-Mobile searches.)

I guess for my own knowledge if I ever do buy an iPhone down the road, is there something in this product description that would lead you to believe it *doesn't* work on the U.S. T-Mobile network?

AnalogMan

Here is my concern with buying a T-mobile phone on the secondary market. Their controls are pretty lax, and your 'clean ESN' phone today can become blocked at any time. T-Mobile doesn't do a lot of checking to validate whether the phone is truly stolen or not. Also, if someone sells you a phone they financed; the ESN may be clean today. Next month when they stop paying, the ESN is blocked. You need a lot of documentation from the seller to make sure the phone is legitimately owned, free and clear.

A new phone having no box is suspicious to me.

A seller with 41 ratings seems risky to me.

Here is an alternative. Sure, you can only get iPhone 5 (same guts as 5C I believe), but none of the secondary market concerns.
http://stores.ebay.com/factorycertified/br%20/ (the link comes from the article below)
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/...gsm-iphones-5s

TWA884

What you are missing is network reliability.

I was a Sprint subscriber for over twelve years. About six months after I renewed my contract two years ago, service quality started deteriorating badly. The phone would constantly go back and forth between full and no bars. Calls would drop several times in the middle of a conversation. Data service would constantly hunt between 3G and 4G LTE, especially when in a moving vehicle. That would render most navigation apps virtually useless.

Customer service was in denial that there was a network problem. Really? It happened on all of our phones and to just about every other Sprint user with whom I was acquainted in my area (Southern California). That was totally unacceptable and they wouldn't own up to the problem.

The straw that broke the camel's back was when our Airvana stopped working at home and they wouldn't replace it because it was due to a "known issue" with my ISP's modem/router. Why did it act up all of a sudden? BTW, my then college student also needed an Airvana in the dorm because there was no reception there without one in a city not terribly far from Sprint's headquarters and where Sprint is a leading carrier. At least I understood why we had reception issues at home; we live in hilly terrain.

I finally dumped Sprint with six months to go on the contract and went with Verizon. We have reception everywhere, even at home. Data services are fast and reliable. We received enough incentives from Verizon to more than make up for the ETF.

And you know what? My bill went up only about $7 a month for a comparable plan because Verizon has much lower junk charges. For me it is totally worth it. I'm sorry that we waited so long.

BTW, a couple of weeks after I switched, Sprint started their "pardon our dust" advertising campaign. Too little, too late.

Verizon's surcharges are about 3.4%. With Sprint, they were ~10.4%.

Error 601

Assuming this started late Winter - Early Spring 2012... what you were experiencing was the decommissioning of Nextel towers being eliminated as part of "Network Vision" where Sprint CDMA equipment was co-located. They turned up the juice on the remaining towers but they lacked the backhaul for the added coverage radius. Sprint began aggressively eliminating Nextel lease towers long before Nextel itself was shutdown.

TWA884

Fall of 2012, at about the time that the LTE network was being activated here. The reception issues probably developed earlier at my kid's university, where Sprint supposedly deployed an enhanced in-building and campus cellular network.

And just to clarify, I was a Sprint, not Nextel subscriber. I do understand that the cells were co-located on the same towers.

For me, the most drastic deterioration in reception quality was at my office, on the tenth floor with a huge window, that until that time had perfect reception. All of a sudden, I was even experiencing missing and delayed text messages in addition to poor voice and data service.

I haven't looked back since the day I switched.

A couple of days ago, I received an email promotion from Verizon, touting their 4G LTE coverage. If accurate, the comparison maps are a real eye opener. Sprint's 4G LTE coverage in California is pathetic. T-Mobile's footprint is several fold larger geographically.

LIH Prem

It appears to be model A1533 which is the correct model for t-mo USA. But it could just be a stock photo. The price is $585 now.

Prepaid t-mo plans have zero junk fees. I just pay Hawaii GET (effectively like a 4.166% sales tax for this) on my $30 per month plan.

(100 voice minutes + unlimited text + data throttled after 5GB per month; plan not eligible for their free 2G international data or discounted intl voice calls)

Error 601

At the end of the day it comes down to Sprint eliminated about a third of their towers, that inevitably created both coverage issues and backhaul bottlenecks. To this day I don't think they have fixed their backhaul problems now that they have to also deal with Clearwire towers that were on microwave backhaul too.

pinniped

This thread prompted me to dig into coverage maps a bit...

Right now at home with Sprint, I get about 12MB down using a Galaxy S3. That's 4G LTE, usually with 3-4 bars. My complaints with Sprint have never been really my speed at home...it's frustration about traveling around the U.S., being in the middle of large airports and large cities, and only having 3G.

The newest Sprint coverage map shows that I'm in the zone of something called "Sprint Spark", which I've never heard of before. It promises up to 60MB if I have a Spark phone, of which the newer ones (S5, LG, etc.) all are.

T-Mo shows my house in their "very strong" coverage area, but in a narrow band about a block from "excellent" and a block from "good". It doesn't suggest what speed this would be, nor how stable it would be.

Wondering if anyone here has Sprint Spark, or if anyone can comment on or interpret what my T-Mobile signal is likely to be.

AnalogMan

My wife has a Virgin Mobile (owned by Sprint) phone which is Sprint Spark capable, and we live in a Spark (I believe Spark means LTE over three frequency bands being used simultaneously) enabled area.

The good: It was working two weeks ago, and I got 50Mb/s of download speed on Speedtest at our home.

The bad: Network reliability. LTE started not working very well at our home, she gets 1 or zero bars, and her phone battery starts draining very quickly. It's so bad I had to turn off LTE on her phone (and then she gets full, which is 6ish, bars on 3G).

TWA884

When towers near capacity, Sprint postpaid customers receive priority for use of voice, text and data services over prepaid subscribers, i.e., Boost and Virgin.

joshwex90

I would never buy that phone from Amazon.

Look at the 5 star ratings - they are quite fishy to begin with. So I checked some out. One has reviewed over 20 phones this year. Who's buying 20 phones in one year?
When a seller has thousands of reviews, it's safe to go by them. With 40 reviews, and some that clearly look like they are fake, I wouldn't get that (considering it seems to fly in the face of it's market value).

If you're to believe some other reviews, the cost of an iPhone 5S went UP almost $100, just 2 weeks before the iPhone 6 is expected to be released. That makes no sense

pseudoswede

Wouldn't be surprised if our fearless moderator does!

pinniped

For what it's worth, I'm personally unlikely to buy a $500 phone from anyone for any reason and I can't vouch for that particular seller. If I went with a BYOD plan, it would be because I felt like smartphone technology had matured enough that my experience using 2-year-old tech was sufficient. The only phone I've bought online from an Amazon reseller was a $130 Sprint Galaxy S3 (existing one broke), and it still functions well today.

So a conversion to BYOD in the coming months, for me, would likely entail some used Galaxy S4's.

We'll see how things shake out in the next couple months. Perhaps Sprint will lose droves of existing customers and sweeten the pot to keep contract renewals onboard. If so, I'll look at one more subsidized 2-year deal with a stack of new Galaxy S5's. The good thing is that now there are some very straightforward BYOD plans out there that more easily expose what you're really paying over two years to get subsidized phones.

msp3

Sprint is about to become the latest casualty of the US telecom wars — and it’s partly thanks to a temperamental, impulsive Japanese billionaire.

When Sprint was acquired by Japan-based SoftBank in 2013, it was the nation’s No. 3 carrier, boasting cutting-edge tech that included a trove of spectrum that analysts saw as a formidable threat to Verizon and AT&T.

This week, the 28-year-old company got a final thumbs-up to be acquired by former No. 4, T-Mobile, which Sprint had been bigger than in market value at the time when SoftBank acquired it. In the years since, Sprint has shed 10,000 employees, watched its stock seesaw, and gained a reputation for hopelessly spotty service.

What went wrong? Insiders and experts point a finger at SoftBank’s Chief Executive, Masayoshi Son. Brash, impatient and staggeringly wealthy, Son was bent on merging Sprint with T-Mobile as soon as he could. Ignoring seasoned Sprint executives who advised him to play it cool, Son soon clashed with regulators. With his deal hopes in tatters, he began slowly gutting the company.

https://nypost.com/2020/02/12/how-so...test-casualty/