Just want to confirm if this phone has the band needed:

Also any idea if the prepaid carriers will be able to access band 12?

if it's sold directly by t-mobile and recent phone, it's fine (will contain all bands that t-mobile uses)

prepaid should have access to band 12...

Now that we have phones with band 12, working from home in the basement has been so much better. Wifi reception is sometimes iffy since my desk is located under a bunch of ductwork, so I sometimes have trouble with wifi calling. I used to only get one bar of reception; now I get four bars, and phone calls using the cellular network have been fantastic.

Is it feasible to hardwire a wifi extender/router in the basement?

It is, but I'm too lazy right now. :)

I also have some powerline ethernet equipment, but it's been very unreliable. When I have some more time and expendable funds, I will investigate upgrading my powerline ethernet equipment or perhaps switching over to MoCA.

I'm considering coming back to Tmo. What are the reviews of the changes to the network?

more congestion (they're fixing it). more confusion (no longer "simple" choice plans - Tmobile One/One+, unlimited data but throttled tethering/video)

more coverage, but mostly visible on highways (eg when you exit highway to a rural town, signal may or maynot be there)

Tmobile got more low frequency spectrum (band 12), useful for rural areas/underground



they're deploying the new AWS-3 spectrum (band 66), useful for capacity increases, not a huge thing (compared to band 12 which is a musthave).
Only phone so far w/ band 66 = LG V20

There's also 256QAM/4x4 mimo upgrades, need compatible handset(only s7/s7 edge only so far), allows greater efficiency(30%increase in speed) and signal quality on existing spectrum

T-Mobile sucks at San Diego International Airport. It's also very spotty in many parts of the Colorado Rockies. Otherwise, it's great to use.

Compared to 2014, it's a much different network. Even compared to this time last year they've made major improvements. Areas in rural NY where I was getting GSM only last year now have full LTE.

For Florida, I've had better coverage and speed with T-Mobile than Verizon. Poor & declining coverage is why I dumped Verizon. We used to get 4-5 bars at my office. Now it's 0-1, 1X only. Same story for two of my condos around the state. Used to have acceptable coverage, now No Signal or CDMA 1X only. I might be able to discount losing signal in one location, but when I'm seeing declining signal in multiple cities at multiple sites, and I even use different phones, Verizon's having issues. I suspect they've been culling leased tower sites to save $.

The only places I've encountered congestion on T-Mobile has been JFK airport during the evening push and IRROPs were in full effect, and at Universal Studios Orlando. But at least I have signal whereas with Verizon I had no signal at all. And...unlike Verizon, once you have WiFi, the phone works flawlessly with all functions, not just phone calls. No more Verizon Wireless Extenders needed. I believe T-Mobile will still send you a free pair of LTE booster/repeaters if you wish. I was planning on getting a pair when I switched over, but after a year I still haven't ordered them as I've not needed them.

Most new Verizon phones have WiFi calling.

@TWA884: My office has both T-Mobile & Verizon phones in use. I have both a Verizon S5 & a T-Mobile Note 4, so I see the differences. I also was part of the CDMA deployment team for GTE back in the late 90s and GSM for AT&T in ~2002-2004.

Verizon's WiFi Calling is exactly that -- voice calls only. No SMS/MMS or other cellular network features work while on WiFi with Verizon. Verizon still has a thorny issue of operating on two completely incompatible, overlapping technologies. CDMA (15 year old tech) and LTE (5 year old tech). CDMA was built to be a voice calling service, nothing more. Data capabilities were bolted onto it, but never were capable of handling voice calls. This is also why Verizon customers can't use data & voice at the same time unless they're on an LTE connection. Due to its ancient architecture, CDMA is unable to support VoIP calls, thus no WiFi Calling. Only Verizon's LTE network is compatible with WiFi Calling.

So when traveling between x & y on Verizon:
LTE -> WiFi, Call survives (~75% of the time)
WiFi -> LTE, Call survives (~ 40% of the time)
CDMA -> Wireless Extender, Call survives
Wireless Extender -> CDMA, Call drops
LTE -> CDMA, Call drops
CDMA -> LTE, Call drops
CDMA -> WiFi, Call drops
WiFi -> CDMA, Call drops


T-Mobile got lucky as their acquisitions were on the GSM bandwagon. I say lucky, because LTE, HSPA, UTMS, EDGE all are backwards compatible down to GSM. Everything after GSM was designed to be a data network. As such, my T-Mobile Note 4 essentially acts like an IP/internet phone. As soon as the phone sees a data connection, it tries to establish a connection to T-Mobile's servers and runs with it. On WiFi, it establishes a VPN connection, runs a few quality tests on the link, then routes all of the traffic through the VPN. HD Voice over WiFi? No problem. SMS/MMS? Works the same whether I'm on a T-Mobile tower, on GoGo, or on a WiFi overseas.

I can go from LTE ->"4G" HSPA+ ->GSM on T-Mobile without dropping a call. The phone also handles WiFi <-> LTE seamlessly. It's very common for me to start a phone call while at home on my home WiFi, get in the car, phone switches over to LTE, get to the office, phone switches over to the office WiFi, all on the same call, seamlessly.

The only thing which the T-Mobile network doesn't handle gracefully is going back to faster services after it goes down to GSM. The phone will flip between WiFi <-> LTE <-> 3G while in a call without a problem. It'll drop down to GSM as a last resort. Once you reach GSM, audio quality is degraded and there's no more simultaneous data until you end the call. Once you've ended the call, the phone looks for towers again and bumps you up to the fastest available. It's quite interesting to watch the phone hop between the different networks and how well it handles it. Of course, this is a minor complaint. If I was using my Verizon phone, any switch between their two networks causes a dropped call every time.

Both my previous Verizon phone, LG G4, and my current one, Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, as well as a close friend's S6 Edge+ have VoLTE (voice over LTE). When on LTE, which is 90%+ of the time, I can use voice and data simultaneously. To activate VoLTE and WiFi calling go to "Advanced Calling" in settings (specific instructions for the SG S5).

Depending on the signal strength, my phone switches as needed between CDMA, VoLTE and WiFi calling rarely dropping the calls (most often from CDMA/VoLTE to WiFi when I'm home - in a mountainous area with widely variable 3G and 4G signal strength).

When I was recently in Europe and did not want pay for another day's worth of Verizon's TravelPass, as I was about to board my flight back to the US, I had no problems making and receiving calls via WiFi calling free of charge.

Even before the Advanced Calling features were added in a software update approximately a year ago, when I still had the LG phone, I was able to send and receive SMS/MMS over WiFi, as well as CDMA and LTE, using Verizon's standard messaging app, Verizon Messages (also known as Message+), regardless of which network the other party was using.

My phone also downloads voicemail messages over WiFi. I'm not aware of any network features that don't work when I'm on WiFi.

All that being said, if T-Mobile is right for you, enjoy it. In Southern California, especially in the canyons and mountains, the T-Mobile network is vastly inferior to those of AT&T and Verizon.

It's true: you need to have VoLTE turned on on your phone for wifi calling to work with Verizon.

Wifi calling supports SMS and MMS messages just fine. I send them all the time. I believe what it's doing is encapsulating the CDMA/LTE data packets inside IPSec over the internet.