Flow LTE

[khat17]

I'm on the road so let me be clear.

FLOW is the better network for calls in general.

Digicel is the better network for data in general.

Digicel gives you data and you can tell when that will end. Their "unlimited" calls are absolutely not unlimited. I've never gotten FUP messages on FLOW regardless of call usage.

On my last trip to Portland, both networks had EDGE but one could actually browse while the other didn't. Can't recall right now. Once I do I'll post.

Originally, back in the day, large companies did tests around New Kingston and found that FLOW did better in elevators while Digicel had low or no signal. That should be improved now.

Under normal circumstances, driving the entire South Coast between Kingston and MoBay, I've found that Digicel data holds up better than FLOW. While FLOW is overall faster, the data handover is poor. I will be driving and see LTE disappear and never come back unless I disable/enable data. Digicel originally only had LTE in major towns, but it's now available for most of the route.

Calls dropped more on Digicel along the route. FLOW has better call handover.

Digicel drops from LTE to EDGE when on a call while FLOW drops to H+. Digicel most times is unable to browse while on a call.

I will say this. Today surprised me on Digicel. I was on a conference call for almost 2 hours. There were many points that I couldn't hear much due to garbled speech, but the call didn't cut off as much as previous trips. Not sure what happened.

More results will come as things progress, but both networks appear to be improving overall.

As for mobile unlimited. I'm tempted to do it because the speeds are better than what FLOW offers me at home. Upload speeds over 50Mb? Not sure when I going see that at home. My monthly transfers easily go over 1TB. I did a backup of my music collection to cloud storage and it was 580GB. Took me a week on my current connection. My phone would have done so much better.

[Brandysull]

Some interesting things are happening on FLOW's network again.



Here's their new 850 MHz layer, now curiously located in the former spectrum block owned by Claro, which ended being owned by Digicel until very recently. If my observation proves correct, FLOW & Digicel seem to have done a band swap on CLR; aligning Digicel's 850 & 900 MHz licenses.

If anyone on Digicel has a recent screencap of the 3G Radio environment, please share.

[khat17]

@Brandysull - nice as the developments may be on the backend - the customer experience is still poor. Not just the customer service. And on both networks.

Today (or was it yesterday?) while switching between FLOW/Digicel I noticed that both networks had LTE, but FLOW took a LONG time to have messages delivered over WA and browsing was slow. I'm thinking that they've done some work and capped things because I'm fairly sure they're not having a capacity issue.

[Nathan77791]

Anyone here knows if Flow has deployed or have plans to deploy LTE band 5 (850Mhz). I'm picking up Band 5 LTE from Digicel in my area, but nothing from Flow. Both Digicel and Flow needs to deploy LTE band for phones that are unlocked and use Global LTE bands, more specifically Band 5 (850Mhz) Band 1 (2100Mhz) and Band 3 (1800Mhz). Band 7 (2600Mhz) would be great as well. They have to remember that many phones only support these bands, and the User equipment is already widespread in the market already.

[Brandysull]

Seems that FLOW has enabled Voice over LTE (VoLTE) AND VoWiFi (Voice over WiFi) on its network; some subscribers will be able to access it if they have a Samsung device (seems they're working with able to have it certified for iPhone) and are locked into a bundle, or explicitly request it from Customer Care.

Read about it here: https://discoverflow.co/jamaica/supp...e_tid_depth=47

[jrmobility]

Seems like someone purchased AWS-3 spectrum adjacent to FLOW's AWS-1 allocation. Does anyone know who bought it? I suspect it's FLOW since its adjacent to their AWS-1.

https://www.sma.gov.jm/wp-content/up...March-2023.pdf

[Nathan77791]

Seems like someone purchased AWS-3 spectrum adjacent to FLOW's AWS-1 allocation. Does anyone know who bought it? I suspect it's FLOW since its adjacent to their AWS-1.

https://www.sma.gov.jm/wp-content/up...March-2023.pdf

Yes I believe it's FLOW as well. But Rock Connect could also have purchased as slice. The 3500Mhz band and 2600Mhz band purchase is definitely Rock Connect. They will be launching 5G as per a release from Nokia.