@jbtaylor on tech

It's official. Sprint has begun offering Sprint 4G in Washington, D.C., suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia.

We announced it with a midnight news release a few minutes ago. We also launched Sprint 4G in Los Angeles, South Florida (Miami, Ft. Lauderdale and West Palm Beach), Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio. Plus, we announced that we will begin offering Sprint 4G in San Francisco on Dec. 28.

Locally you can get a Sprint 4G signal as far south as Ft. Belvoir & Newington, as far east as Annapolis, as far west as Manassas & Leesburg, and as far north as Germantown & Columbia. Sprint 4G is found in all parts of D.C., including neighborhoods like Georgetown, Anacostia, Logan Circle, Dupont, Adams-Morgan, Southwest, Downtown, Capitol Hill, Cleveland Park, Brookland, Petworth and Columbia Heights.

Areas inside the Beltway (like Annandale, Alexandria, Arlington, Shirlington, Falls Church and Bethesda and Silver Spring are covered) but so are communities outside the Beltway (like Reston, Herndon, Lanham, Gaithersburg, Tysons Corner, National Harbor and Largo.)

Over the coming months, you will see more areas covered as new 4G cell sites come on line in the metro area. 

For coverage maps visit Sprint.com. You may also want to visit Sprint.com/4G for more details about our offering.

It's not often Patti LaBelle shows up with a surprise.

But today on The Nate Berkus Show, Ms. LaBelle had a big surprise for Tawan Fields of Durham, N.C.

Ms. Fields is a community volunteer in Durham, N.C. and by all accounts, is one of those people who just keeps on giving till she has nothing left to give. Part of what she does is cover the cell phone bills of her 9 family members, who otherwise wouldn't be in regular contact with one another.

Berkus came to Sprint for help because Ms. Fields is a Sprint customer. When we heard her story, we wanted to help. That's why we are covering the cell phone bills for her and her family for the next year.

Watch the clip posted above to see Ms. Fields' reaction to the surprise meeting with Patti LaBelle and listen to LaBelle share the good news.

It will make you smile, I promise.

Earlier this summer, J.D. Powers released its semi-annual report on wireless call quality. The company said among the major cities it surveyed, Charlotte has the poorest wireless coverage. They did not, however, provide a breakdown of where the major wireless companies stand in Charlotte; they just said on average, the coverage in Charlotte had the most problems.

That said, J.D. Powers did rank the carriers by region, and in the region where Charlotte is, Sprint tied for first with T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless. You know who was last.

Eric Frazier, a reporter with the Charlotte Observer, has a story in Sunday's paper which examines the obstacles carriers must overcome to build out an effective network. As part of this story, I arranged to give him a tour of a cell site so he could tell his readers a little bit more about the engineering that goes into ensure that you can make and receive a wireless call.

The story, while focused on Charlotte, could have been written about any metro area in the country. Because as I said in the story, no wireless company is 100 percent perfect, 100 percent of the time.

The photos I've linked to above are from the cell site tour I organized for Eric. But you'll also want to read the sidebar for the story, where Eric describes his impressions of the cell site we showed him. Just click on a box to left of the main story when you browser opens the main window.

If you want to understand tech policy and the billions of dollars which are at stake when regulators like the FCC act, learn something about wireless spectrum. It really is the bread and butter of the industry and it's a finite resource. (That's what makes it so valuable.)

Matthew Lasar, who's spectrum story I link to above, is as good as anyone in explaining the complicated in terms laypeople can understand. Read him and you will learn a lot.

I promise.

If you're concerned about the budget deficit and the national debt, you should support the FCC's plan to build it a public safety broadband network.

In the op-ed I link to above, John Kneuer, a former head of NTIA in the George W. Bush administration explains why this fiscally conservative plan makes the most sense for public safety.

He writes:

"The danger of not acting now is real. If public safety agencies are simply given another band of spectrum, with no plans for funding, and no plans for leveraging commercial networks and technologies, the cause for public safety broadband will be set back years, if not decades."

The smart thing about the FCC's plan is that the revenue from a spectrum auction will completely pay for the construction of a new public safety broadband network. It won't cost taxpayers a dime.

That's why so many Republicans are supporting this idea from the Democratic-led FCC.

As we come off an election where so many promised to work in a bi-partisan way to solve the problems facing the country, it seems to me that this one of the first problems that should be tackled.