Unfortunately Boost/Dish struggled significantly with finances and customer attraction post COVID, largely due to two problems (seamless roaming between their own network and partners’, and more importantly, getting manufacturers like Apple to build compatible phones). When the current president came into the picture, the FCC essentially forced the sale of Dish’s primary spectrum licenses to administration-friendly SpaceX, for future Starlink use.

As of now, they are in the process of moving their customers to AT&T (and possibly a secondary agreement with T-Mobile), but they seem to be maintaining their own network core - that’s likely why they’re able to implement support for this, while AT&T does not.

I've known for a long time that T-Mobile shipped junk apps upon initial setup, but seeing them loaded OTA after a single click on an ad (even a few pixels off of the "x" button) is very concerning. Even putting aside the moral issues with practices like this, that's a huge security hole in a very large percentage of Android phones.

Despite not being real-time, it's the best / most accurate app I've found of its kind and has a good community behind it.

[0] https://www.cellmapper.net/map

Not sure if older iPhones would come with older versions too, I assume used ones would normally be up to date - though iPhone X and earlier are jailbreakable on all versions via checkm8

The reason 2G and 3G can sometimes reach further than LTE is for a similar reason - because it's easier to "hang onto" a 2/3G signal. The reason it's easier though is different - not because 3G is more efficient, but because it's less complex. This reddit thread[0] explains it better than I can, so I'll paste a comment from it here:

>>> The modulation scheme (how the digital "data" is packed into the "analog" wave to transmit it over the air) is simpler for [2G], which requires a lower wave quality to decode. It's the same reason you are more likely to get an [2G] signal farther away than LTE

Note that the reason 3G might be "faster" is probably due more to the congestion issue I talked about before - when the LTE network is oversubscribed, meaning too many people are connected to it and are slowing it down, sometimes dropping back to 3G (which very few people are connected to in 2021) can lead to you fighting less over your data.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/lwwkrl/when_was_th...

5G uses the same radio waves that 4G has, in many cases - T-Mobile US, for example, uses 600MHz and 2.5GHZ frequencies for 5G (and 4G). Sprint has been using 2.5GHz for 4G since 2008.

The biggest change that 5G could bring today honestly is capacity - if you've ever tried to use LTE in a busy train station, you can tell the impact that congestion has on that network's subscribers. Thousands of people connected to a few cells leads to significant slowdown. Generally, higher frequencies lead to shorter range and higher throughput, so in specific circumstances like Airports[0] with multiple antennas, 5G can allow for much higher throughput to many devices at once, alleviating congestion.

5G can also more efficiently make use of spectrum, which means 5G networks can reach further than 4G networks built on the same frequency.

There's a lot more to this, and I'd recommend reading into the Wikipedia page[1] on 5G for an in-depth look if you have time - but the basics are, 5G is a standard, not any one set of devices or antennas or expectations.

[0] https://news.tampaairport.com/tpa-welcomes-5g-and-enhanced-4... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G

(As an aside, I keep HN at 150% and old reddit at 120% - those are the only 2 sites I have permanently zoomed)

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26364487

Points: 49

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