T-Mobile to Offer Additional Support for iPhone Users on Its Network

As much as people love to hate on AT&T, I've actually had better customer service with them than Verizon. When people say AT&T has bad service, I never actually hear any details about an encounter they had. It's just taken for fact.

The capability is in the qualcomm radio. Apple just needs to invest in the transceiver, PCB changes and modifications to the external antenna to support the AWS bands. Given these are small hurdles, the hurdle is a political/economics one, not a technical one.

Even handsets that support LTE over AWS like the AT&T HTC Vivid have the HSPA+ radio disabled on the AWS portion, again effectively locking out T-Mobile. This shows it's purely politics and probably stipulated by AT&T to have the phone on their network.

I suspect you will see Apple do something similar to "save battery" or something.

The capability is in the qualcomm radio. Apple just needs to invest in the transceiver, PCB changes and modifications to the external antenna to support the AWS bands. Given these are small hurdles, the hurdle is a political/economics one, not a technical one.

The specs aren't going to advertise it because apple has no intention of running on those frequencies.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1092599



AWS is UMTS 1700

Even handsets that support LTE over AWS like the AT&T HTC Vivid have the HSPA+ radio disabled on the AWS portion, again effectively locking out T-Mobile. This shows it's purely politics and probably stipulated by AT&T to have the phone on their network.

I suspect you will see Apple do something similar to "save battery" or something.

The "save battery" excuse is crap and anyone with a basic understanding of how it works should know it. It is not hard to have something in the OS in the phone to turn off all bands on the chip that can not be used by the carrier. If the phone is locked to AT&T then you turn off the all the things not in use. Heck in the current iPhone there is no way in hell that they do not have those unused bands and parts of the chips just turned off to save battery.

So that excuse is pure crap but not going to stop Apple from using it and then their blind following masses to defend Apple using that excuse. You should look back at when the original iPhone did not have MMS the excuses people used to defend Apple. They were a joke.

As much as people love to hate on AT&T, I've actually had better customer service with them than Verizon. When people say AT&T has bad service, I never actually hear any details about an encounter they had. It's just taken for fact.

Ok, I will give actual examples:

First off, please note that with AT&T, this is a business account, so there are a ton of lines on it and we spend a fair amount with them every month.

There was fraud committed on the account, which took several months to get the charges reversed, even though they acknowledged the fraud. Then when we went to order new phones, we were "not eligible for an upgrade" as they never fixed our upgrade eligibility status when they removed the line. I had to go to the vice president of AT&T to get this resolved.

They also had double billed us for certain lines and kept saying it was our fault.

Anytime that I need to call them, it takes 15-20 minutes to get a live person and this is through their key contact center, which is supposed to be a lot faster than the consumer side.


Now, let's compare this to T-Mobile, which I personally have as a family line with 5 lines:
We accidentally purchased something, it was our fault, but we called T-Mobile, they immediately reversed the charges.

When they started enabling data by default for smart phones and charging for it, we called them after we were charged about $100, they reversed the charges (and extra) and put a block on it within about 2 minutes.

My wife wanted to be able to tether her Android phone, she called them, they gave her instructions on how to do so without having to pay the extra $5 per month that they officially want you to pay.

We have never waited for more than 2 minutes on hold for a representative and that was when 1/2 the state was experiencing a service outage.

I had to call T-Mobile Customer Service twice and got treated like a king (phone and text spam related issues). They went above and beyond what I asked and expected as far as crediting my account.

Awesome, just awesome service...

I've heard good things about Verizon as well. Sprint okay....

Then there's the people I know with iPhones on AT&T... :eek:

;)

They should just officially start selling iPhones. I'd switch in a heartbeat, if the heartbeat is the length of the remaining time on my current contract.

I wonder how this will turn out, best would of course be if they started selling iphones themselves but i don't think thats gonna happen anytime soon.

Will I be allowed to tether my phone to my laptop? Will the data plan be reasonably priced?

I love T-Mobile's customer service. Easily one of the best I've experienced anywhere at various types of companies. They've always taken care of my problems with my bill and gone beyond what I expected/needed. If the next iPhone comes here, I'll definitely renew my contract.