[Samsung Epic 4G Touch] bitbang3r:
Reduction of CDMA capacity is no big deal for Sprint. The truth is, compared to AT&T and Verizon, Sprint has absolutely sinful amounts of 1900MHz spectrum to burn in most markets. In quite a few places, it literally has more 1900MHz spectrum than it knows what to do with. For the most part, Sprint isn't spectrum-constrained, it's backhaul-constrained. Once they upgrade their backhaul, they most certainly DO have the spectrum available to activate multi-carrier Rev.B in most parts of the US.

If you live in an area with thin coverage (like Warren, Ohio-Hermitage, Pennsylvania... an area where I have family members and know the local tower topology fairly well because I spent an afternoon exploring it out of boredom once) rev.B won't do much because their towers are fairly spread out and operating in high-power mode (which splatters each user across a bigger total chunk of spectrum across a much larger area than is typical somewhere like Miami), but if you're somewhere like Hoboken, Arlington, central Atlanta, Orlando, Miami, central Dallas, Chicago, etc... yeah, it IS going to make a fairly big difference, because in THOSE areas, Sprint has a tower site every mile or two, and just about anyplace you stand (outdoors, at least) is going to be in clear range of multiple towers in every direction.

Rev.B is kind of like 802.11G/N... if you'd have a crap 802.11B signal somewhere in your house, G won't do a thing, and N will probably be worse. On the other hand, if you're standing someplace where 802.11B is pegging your phone, G will be faster, and N will be MUCH faster. Likewise, if you're someplace where EVDO barely works and your phone is falling back to 1xRTT, rev.B is academic. If you're someplace where rev.A is rock solid, and you're surrounded by towers in a market where Sprint isn't spectrum-constrained, B will make you very, very happy when you get into speedtest.com wars with Verizon and AT&T coworkers.

I think it's safe to say that 99% of the people who ordered this phone did so without having any idea that the lack might actually matter, partly on the faith that Sprint couldn't possibly release a brand new flagship phone incapable of doing something existing phones can do (I think even the original Evo4G can do rev.B).

Honestly, I think Sprint got caught with its pants down. The people at Samsung probably had no idea rev.B was even on the horizon for Sprint, it never occurred to Sprint's buyers to ask (maybe they didn't know, maybe they just took for granted Samsung would use the new chip, maybe it just didn't occur to them), and two days ago might very well have been the first time any significant number of Sprint employees had that oh... ****... moment of realizing that they dropped the ball & couldn't do a thing to fix it.

Exceptionally unlikely to happen, because that would make it a total doorstop in the US. Verizon and AT&T have LTE, but it's used ONLY for data. In theory, you could make a phone devoid of 3G that did LTE (for data) and legacy GSM (which would add AT&T to the list of carriers that worked), but that phone would STILL be useless to Verizon, and useless to roughly 70% of AT&T's users in America (if you lived outside one of their golden LTE cities, its data throughput would be the approximate speed of a 9600 baud modem).

Google wouldn't back a phone guaranteed to flop spectacularly in their own back yard. If anything, Google is moving in the opposite direction -- their next Nexus (or at least the one that follows) will probably be a design that supports everything under the sun (with the possible exceptions of legacy TDMA, iDEN, and AMPS3). It might not support BOTH wimax AND LTE, but at the very least wimax and LTE will be a daughterboard that can be changed (at least, at the manufacturing level) to support one or the other.

As misguided as I believe it would be, Sprint's most likely strategy at this point is going to be to strike any mention of rev.B from their October 7th announcement, scream loudly and with a single voice that the improvements announced on October 7th won't depend on rev.B, and then quietly deploy rev.B anyway, hoping that anyone with an E4gT won't scream bloody murder and accuse Sprint of lying when their friends with Photons and Evo3Ds start smoking them with Ookla Speedtest. At that point, Sprint will probably mumble something about technology and strategies constantly advancing, say it's not official & still in 'testing', and live under a cloud of building anger from E4gT owners who get angrier and angrier about being stuck with a problem they would have sidestepped by returning the phone had they been made fully aware of it from day one.

Honestly, I think part of how Sprint responds will depend upon how much cash they personally have invested in the Epic 4G Touch. If they purchased them wholesale from Samsung and will be the ones left holding the boxes if there's a massive return and future disinterest from consumers in it, Sprint will probably do its best to deny any near-future rev.B plans exist. If they're vendor-financed and basically sold on consignment by Sprint, Sprint will probably drop the bomb, announce early next week that the E4gT will never officially do rev.B, and let Samsung deal with the mess (possibly throwing Samsung a cookie by saying the difference won't matter to many users, without elaborating).

The fact is, if you own an E4gT, you owe it to yourself to learn as much as you can about whether or not rev.B is likely to be of daily benefit to you within a timeframe that matters (keeping in mind that new phones are a 20-month, not a 12-month, commitment), and act accordingly. No matter how much you like it today, will you still like it 12 months from now (with 8 months to go before upgrade-time) if your data speeds are as slow or slower than they are now, but your friends (with Photons, Evos, and newer phones) are laughing and getting double the throughput you are?

I was personally burned by Sprint/Samsung by a similar datamode gimp ~8-9 years ago when they knowingly sold me a phone that was a data doorstop literally 3 months later when 1xRTT and the i330 came out, and it totally ruined my enjoyment of the phone. I don't want to see Sprint and Samsung *ever* get away with something like that again. I want to make sure that everyone who buys an E4gT today goes into the purchase with his eyes wide open, and knows exactly what he's getting into and what it's going to mean over the life of the phone.

If you're cool with rev.A forever, that's fine... it's an awesome phone. But if you think the lack of rev.B is a big deal, don't kid yourself... it will make you hate the phone and regret its purchase daily long, long before you're due for your next upgrade from Sprint in mid-2013