[Network Compatibility]

On 12/27/2019 at 3:24 AM, fxtec5 said:

I was able to activate mine on Verizon with VoLTE, using my existing droid 4 sim on a pay-as-you-go plan.

I just punched the sim down from the micro sizes in my droid 4 down to a the nano size that the pro1 needs, ran the *#*#4636#*#* trick, and it worked.

That said - if you are looking for a provider to use with the phone, so far I would not recommend verizon. Due to the fact that it is _only_ on LTE, the performance of the phone in marginal coverage areas is... poor... since it cannot drop back down to 3g or lesser networks. Fingers crossed that fxtec gets off their butts and gets the phones officially listed on verizon so the cdma bands start working because my house has marginal coverage and being LTE only is miserable.

Disclaimer - my droid 4 sim has spent some time in a galaxy S5 which has been using VoLTE, so the sim was known to be VoLTE provisioned before the swap. The sim itself is about a year old, and was used with VoLTE in the S5 basically immediately after I got the sim. But it was not a 'fresh' sim by any reasonable definition. If anyone is curious, the APN was automatically detected correctly as "VZWINTERNET", but only after setting the VoLTE sliders in the testing menu. Before activating VoLTE I briefly got service, but shortly after the phone went into 911 only mode as if the sim were not active. After enabling VoLTE and rebooting the APN was correctly detected and my missed SMS messages were delivered immediately after the 4G logo appeared on the status bar.

 

 

Unless the phone gains support for LTE band 13, I seriously doubt this phone will be a good option for someone on Verizon.

 

15 hours ago, Polaris said:

My pleasure.  The relationship is purely a logical software one.  It reads the RSRP (received power) & RSRQ (received quality) and then converts it to a bar graph and numerical and/or percentage.  Simple as that.  The Pro1 is being more honest about things, not sure if there is intent to deceive with the BB or not, but it's not even close to being accurate with 4 bars.

 

I don't think lying is the correct phrase to be used with the LTE Discovery app (as lying implies intent), but the app is often incorrect, and most people don't know because they don't really have any other way of testing this aspect.  In my case, once I suspected things were wrong due to my ancient phone (which I love dearly) not even supporting the band, I then confirmed it with a spectrum analyzer.  It was very clear that the phone was actually in band 13 (again, the only LTE band it supports) from the analyzer's display.

You might want to check out another app which provides it's own interpretation of RSPR & RSRQ.  I haven't used it in a while, but back when I was messing with this, and discussing it with the LTE Discovery developer, it was helpful.  It is called SignalCheck Lite.  The app uses color coded bars to graphically represent the signal strength, and always seemed to be rather accurate.

 

I agree with both sentiments.  The good news is that, as of now, there are very few areas where the B66 frequencies in use are outside of the B4 block.  Thus, the Pro1 will work in much of B66.  The bad news, is that I was told by a Verizon RF engineer they are ramping up converting (or installing) sites that use the entire B66 bandwidth, so then we'll be SOL on B66.  Keep in mind though, it's very rare for a cell to only use one band so those cells which have B66 only might also have B13 and B4 on them too.

I could be wrong, but at least in my area (Washington DC area) they are rolling out B66 on towers on T-Mobile.

[Network Compatibility]

23 hours ago, Polaris said:

Note: I'm replying to this separately as they are totally different issues...

-99dBm is awful signal (becoming borderline unusable) and there is no way the BB should be showing 4 bars!  -107 beyond horrible and probably mostly unusable (meaning tons of packet retries).

Nonetheless, the BB appears to have a much better receiver (than the Pro1) in that site 148 has a 6 dBm improvement (over the Pro1), and site 149 has a full 10 dBm improvement (over the Pro1).  As I'm sure you know, it's a logarithmic scale where 3 dBm refers to a doubling of the power and 10 dBm would be a ten fold increase.  This is a massive difference!  Of course, before we write off the Pro1 as having a poor radio, it should be noted that the phones shouldn't be this close together (for various reasons, but germane to this discussion is) because the local oscillators, and transmitted RF energy can negatively affect each other.  That said, it has piqued my interest as there is also a WiFi thread about weak WiFi signal, so when I have a moment I'll look into this matter comparing the Pro1 to other phones known to have good or poor transceivers.

-99 dBm for LTE isn't that bad of a signal. My Pixel 3 XL is getting a LTE signal of around -109 dBm. Anything -115 dBm and up on the other hand is a different story....