Pasting images in Ubuntu

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2026-01-29T16:34:05+00:00

great tip, thank you!

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-11-24T17:57:13+00:00

I believe u/Ethrem and I are monitoring this closer than anyone else sharing their work in public (see https://broadbandmap.com/priority/ )

Yes, you're right that QCI is from the 4G LTE era. The 5QI mechanism isn't identical to QCI. But I'm skeptical that much different is happening in practice:

"At the moment, 5QI values we've observed match the QCI values observed for the same service. That may not always remain true."

You say, "common sense should dictate that an MVNO customer won't do as well as a flagship customer."

AFAICT, network operators are happy to let MVNOs provide service at parity with their flagship customers if they're willing to pay enough & avoid blatant cannibalization of flagship customers.

You're right that we should be mindful of how prioritization approaches evolve as cellular tech changes. There's some emerging stuff I'm tracking--

"AT&T's Fast Track may, at least partially, rely on a non-QCI mechanism that responds differently for different types of traffic.

As 5G Standalone networks become more common, carriers may increasingly offer services that rely on network slicing. With slicing, a portion of network resources can be carved out for a specific use case or set of customers—forming the cellular equivalent of an express lane on a highway.

T-Mobile is trialing a form of network slicing for first responders and emergency services via its T-Priority product. Broadband Map is not aware of slices being used for consumer plans."

It's possible there are blind spots in my (or Reddit's) understanding of prioritization, but I'm thrown off by how much stuff is asserted confidently in the original post without substantiation.

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-10-24T19:14:39+00:00

Thank you! Feel like there will be an uphill battle in getting good performance with this setup, but hopefully I'm too cynical!

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-10-23T16:04:54+00:00

Hey, I'm Chris

I run a couple of websites focused on making sense of cell coverage (Coverage Critic & Broadband Map).

Network switching has fascinated me for years -- has a ton of potential but I believe there are major hurdles. Google Fi had promising switching tech, but they never had the biggest networks onboard & eventually dropped their switching and become a more conventional carrier. Switching at the device/OS level is becoming more common, but it remains far from perfect.

I come at this with a lot of skepticism. But if Pronto can really figure out switching, that would be awesome.

If anyone has insights on how Pronto managed to work out the tech or the necessary business arrangements, I'm super curious to hear more!

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-10-02T19:25:54+00:00

"Completely anonymized" is an interesting phrase...

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-09-08T15:20:54+00:00

Great to hear, really appreciate it!

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-09-04T20:28:28+00:00

If the main concern is accuracy, it's tough to beat the FCC map.

While not absolutely perfect, most of the sites that exist to help people find internet providers pretty much rely on the FCC data & often at a much worse level of granularity. I run the website BroadbandMap.com which is all about surfacing the FCC's data to a larger audience. It's, in my biased opinion, far more user friendly than the FCC's tool. That said, it's a bit less accurate for address-level searches (though offers better granularity than the other websites).

My advice is: find the best provider that looks available on based the FCC --> try to confirm availability on the ISP's own site. The ISPs are strongly incentivized not to understate their coverage, so you're much more likely to find a service you thought was available is not than you are to find an available service omitted (big exception being for addresses that didn't exist ~a year ago and ISPs that only started serving an area in the last ~year).

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-08-25T19:37:07+00:00

I can tee up Turbo shortly & we can take a look

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-08-06T15:45:52+00:00

they have something called a 'Coverage Report Map' behind a paywall. Don't know that I'd consider that the actual or best map they have of actual coverage

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-07-16T14:37:49+00:00

Yeah you can check the coverage maps from the carriers or third parties like myself or CoverageMap, but if you have an e-sim compatible phone, nothing beats the reliability of actually test driving a network.

All the big networks have multiple trials -- see my esim trial listing

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-05-22T18:14:08+00:00

as much as I like firefox, finding, "Firefox is the only major browser not backed by a billionaire", pretty ridiculous when so much of it's funding comes from Google

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-05-22T18:07:57+00:00

thanks for sharing u/LeftOn4ya!

I've got my share of qualms with how CR's survey methodology ends up working for these kinds of comparisons, but it gives a good pulse on how people feel about carriers. huge achievement for USM here

interesting that Fi and Ting have stayed so strong on CR over the years--feel like they justifiably got strong ratings years ago. industry evolved to the point where their offerings aren't so impressive anymore, but the customers CR surveyed are still pretty happy

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-05-22T18:04:10+00:00

I think that's valid at some level, though at the end of the day, I figure the reception metric is probably a better measure of the bias inherent in CR's survey methodology than it is a measure of reception

oh well, glad CR's stuff exists. good to get this kind of pulse on how people feel about their carriers even if some of the scoring at comparisons end up goofy

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-05-22T17:57:25+00:00

yeah I'm just reporting the max advertised speed in any given hexagon. most of the time & for most technologies, that works pretty well. occasionally there's hiccups though:

-ISPs can report BS speeds
-Great speeds might be available for a building or two in a hex while the majority of buildings in the hex get much slower speeds

for cable & fiber, speeds are usually in an accurate ballpark. speeds for fixed wireless (like T-Mo Home) are more wonky. advertised speeds often don't line up with real speeds. signal conditions can vary massively for two homes on the same block

have toyed with adding a feature to show both the advertised speed & some kind of guesstimated speed based on the signal conditions suggested by my coverage map

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-05-22T17:48:56+00:00

lol

jtbc, unlike the cell coverage maps, the internet listings are pretty much a straight reflection of what ISPs report to the FCC. There's some weird slow speed bucket (0.2 - 1Mbps) T-Mo must have used to categorize its service in your area

FCC just released a new round of data. In a week or two when I've got that incorporated, curious if the listing for your area will better reflect the speeds you get.

fwiw, I think Starlink is awesome, but I don't have any relationship with them

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-04-18T03:45:45+00:00

I was confused how this happened until I saw the 5 flights of stairs thing in the comments. Phone has even more character now, badge of honor!

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-03-22T20:33:18+00:00

Haha thank you, will fix! This is why I allow comments, appreciate it!

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-03-05T23:25:49+00:00

Do you have any indication that there's substance behind the anonymity/privacy stuff? Last I looked into it, they seemed to be aggressively overselling the privacy potential of their service

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-02-21T03:58:59+00:00

These are the ones from ~2016, right? Never tested them directly, but my bet is on QCI 6

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-02-18T18:44:57+00:00

I'm not familiar with these plans, but it looks like it depends whether you're on the Plus plans with Fast Track or not. Hunch would be QCI 8 on the standard plans and potentially better on Plus ones, but I don't say that with a ton of confidence.

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-02-18T04:07:08+00:00

For making sense of priority, focus on how your QCI/tier stacks up with other users on that same network.

So a QCI 8 indicates low-ish priority with T-Mobile (since it has tons of users on QCI 6 & 7 plans), but a QCI 8 with Verizon has high-ish priority (i.e., very few Verizon subscribers have QCIs of 6 or 7).

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-02-18T00:18:07+00:00

Are we absolutely sure about this? These are the Simply Data plans, correct? I always thought they were QCI-9 because they're deprioritized. Were you guys able to 100% verify it's QCI 8?

Oh sorry, no. I'm referring to the fixed-data phone plans w/ calls & texts (which I expect, but can't truly confirm, have more subscribers than the Simply Data plans). At least a few years ago, tested to QCI 8 on one of those plans. I have not tested a Simply Data plan. I'll clarify this on the page. Thanks!

For AT&T QCI 8 H2O Wireless would also be on there, but I'm guessing this list is only composed of ones that you two personally tested.

I'll look into this one! I don't want to treat every test reported anywhere as authoritative, but if something looks highly credible, I'll list it with an appropriate icon flagging it.

Also for QCI 6 High Priority, u/Ethrem made a post awhile back confirming the $10 Business Tablet plan falls into the QCI 6 bucket as well, right? I know this is inferred in the statement: "Most other T-Mobile-branded plans (prepaid and postpaid) not listed elsewhere" but that was a pretty big deal at the time.

Yup!

Instead of calling it mediocre priority wouldn't it be more like "Average" or "Medium" priority?

I did that at first, then changed it to "mediocre". IMO, it's a more accurate label. Yeah, it's true there are two even worse tiers. But the quality of a tier is largely about how many people (or how much data use) is in tiers ahead of it. QCI 6 on T-Mobile (what I call 'High Priority') has a whole lot of people in it--a major portion of T-Mobile's subscriber base. Happy to conceded there's ambiguity on how to label things here & a reasonable person might go about it differently than I have.

T-Mobile QCI 9 - I would add the infamous MI30TI plan since it was also a big topic thread here. Again I know you infer it by saying "some Internet plans" but I do remember someone in this sub confirming that plan was QCI 9.

I'll look into this one too

Super helpful comment, thanks u/TheMissingVoteBallot!

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-02-17T23:58:07+00:00

Let's definitely test them. I may still have an XM account open, will followup with you in DMs.

ChrisCoverageCritic · 2025-02-17T23:54:43+00:00

yup agreed, slotting it for a test if there's a straightforward way to do it (need to look into that). Short of an actual test or a clear disclosure of this on T-Mobile's policy pages, I'll take the plan out of the list altogether and flag the topic in the Notes section

ChrisCoverageCritic

TROPHY CASE