Jump to content

Network Vision/LTE - Central Iowa Market (Des Moines and surrounding areas)


sweyers

Recommended Posts

here is were most of the info will be at. http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/636-network-vision-site-map-nebraskaiowa-markets/

 

Later,

 

John

Have to be a sponsor to go to that link. Of course most of the info will be there. I just thought Central Iowa deserved a market thread like everyone else.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Have to be a sponsor to go to that link. Of course most of the info will be there. I just thought Central Iowa deserved a market thread like everyone else.

 

It certainly does. Seems we just hadn't had enough interest from the area yet for a thread, but you're welcome to one! As soon as we know anything about sites in progress, or sites accepted, it will be posted here. Right now, all we know is what Robert said, that deployment is underway now, and we should be seeing some progress soon!

 

Let us know if you see anything going on, and welcome to the site!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The tower near Des Moines golf & country club I think has something happening as I've had very poor signal and even flipped to roaming a while today from a location with usually a good signal. I have not seen LTE, so no clue if they are actually upgrading it or just some kind of outage. I'll update if anything fun happens.

 

Thanks to OP for starting this, I can't wait to see some LTE around Des Moines.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

i've been watching towers that i frequent by for weeks now and haven't seen any work yet. I have a feeling though that a lot of the towers around here will initially be ground mount units as there are a lot of monopole and water tower towers that i'm not sure will support RRUs without further engineering. not only that but most of the towers around here the base cabinets are hidden from view if you are just driving by so it makes it hard to see if new cabinets have been installed.

 

i'm thinking also that backhaul will be a major component in this area as a lot of sprint towers are on their own and not co-located with other carriers so they won't have fiber already there they can utilize.

 

and one last thought :) hopefully when sprint gets done with NV they come back and do some re-engineering of their network in the des moines market, looking at tower locations (found in the sponsor section) there are quite a few areas that have expanded and are not covered by very many towers at all. so there are quite a few areas i've driven around where signal is lost because there are too many gaps between towers to properly hand off to.

 

anyway, i'll be posting here and in the iowa thread in the sponsor section when i start to see work being done :)

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

it sounds like preliminary work is starting now. I'm guessing that means lining up permits (if needed) and getting the backhaul vendors lined up to start installing backhaul. Then tower work can commence. My best guess is we would start seeing a live LTE signal in 2+ months.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

How do you tell on the network enhancements map that LTE upgrades have been done ? Data speed upgrades ?

 

You can't. It doesn't say. Speed upgrades just mean that backhaul has been upgraded. Backhaul can be upgraded on a legacy site and just may be additional T1 lines. Most LTE sites will show speed upgrades also, but not all speed upgrades are for LTE sites.

 

Robert via Nexus 7 with Tapatalk HD

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm assuming people getting 3 of the same text is because they are working on the towers ?

 

are you saying you are getting multiple texts or yours are failing and you have to resend multiple times? I see you have listed that you have an iphone5, my wife, brother, and his wife all have this phone and they have a random problem where texts will say they failed to send on their iphone but the person they sent it to did receive the text, then if they resend it the person will get it again. I've never had that problem on my EVO 4G LTE nor has any of my other family with non-iphones complained about it. So if that's the problem you are talking about i would say its an iphone/sprint issue and not related to any tower work being done yet.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

just looked at the NV tread in the sponsor area. Looks like more towers in this area are in progress. :) Just can't wait to see when they go live with LTE.

 

Later,

 

John

You majorly got my hopes up. Maybe you meant to post in East Iowa forum, but as of now that's where all the progress is. Not a single site on the map in the Central Iowa market yet. But I will say, much of Eastern Iowa needs NV much worse than Des Moines. Everytime I have been to the Quad Cities in the past 2 years or so (many times, I have family there) the network has been abysmal.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

i've been watching towers that i frequent by for weeks now and haven't seen any work yet. I have a feeling though that a lot of the towers around here will init1ially be ground mount units as there are a lot of monopole and water tower towers that i'm not sure will support RRUs without further engineering. not only that but most of the towers around here the base cabinets are hidden from view if you are just driving by so it makes it hard to see if new cabinets have been installed.

 

i'm thinking also that backhaul will be a major component in this area as a lot of sprint towers are on their own and not co-located with other carriers so they won't have fiber already there they can utilize.

 

and one last thought :) hopefully when sprint gets done with NV they come back and do some re-engineering of their network in the des moines market, looking at tower locations (found in the sponsor section) there are quite a few areas that have expanded and are not covered by very many towers at all. so there are quite a few areas i've driven around where signal is lost because there are too many gaps between towers to properly hand off to.

 

anyway, i'll be posting here and in the iowa thread in the sponsor section when i start to see work being done :)

Yes there are quite a few "fringe" areas between towers in the Des Moines area. However, considering how much less I pay a month on Sprint than I would on VZ/ATT/USCC, I find the coverage to be adequate, if just barely. I rarely, if eber, completely lose a signal. I didn't count TMO even though they are cheaper, they are not a viable option in my area/personal situation.

 

I don't know how normal it is but we have a LOT of towers on top of stuff. My main tower that I use everyday is on top of the old grain elevator in Waukee. There's towers on top of both the Marriott on Jordan Creek Parkway and the Sheraton at 50th and University, both roughly 12 stories high. There's a tower on top of an office building on Valley West Drive, roughly 8 stories. One on the Clive water tower on University. And that's just on my side of town. Numerous monopole towers as well like you mentioned. But none of these locations make it easy to see whether work is going on or not. I wonder how much impact these "non traditional" towers will have on progress in this area.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes there are quite a few "fringe" areas between towers in the Des Moines area. However, considering how much less I pay a month on Sprint than I would on VZ/ATT/USCC, I find the coverage to be adequate, if just barely. I rarely, if eber, completely lose a signal. I didn't count TMO even though they are cheaper, they are not a viable option in my area/personal situation.

 

I don't know how normal it is but we have a LOT of towers on top of stuff. My main tower that I use everyday is on top of the old grain elevator in Waukee. There's towers on top of both the Marriott on Jordan Creek Parkway and the Sheraton at 50th and University, both roughly 12 stories high. There's a tower on top of an office building on Valley West Drive, roughly 8 stories. One on the Clive water tower on University. And that's just on my side of town. Numerous monopole towers as well like you mentioned. But none of these locations make it easy to see whether work is going on or not. I wonder how much impact these "non traditional" towers will have on progress in this area.

 

i know what you mean! i would say about half of the towers i've seen myself around here are "non-traditional" towers. From what i have been reading on here i'm guessing there are 2 scenarios that will play out for our market.

 

1) all sites are GMO installs and then sometime later they will come back and do a full build with new panels on as many towers as they can, regardless of what kind of tower.

 

2) all non-traditional sites are GMO installs and all traditional sites are full builds and then they come back later and convert all of the GMO sites they can to full builds.

 

while option 1 would obviously give us improved 3G and 4G everywhere i'm hoping for option 2 as the full builds with RRUs will help increase signal and will also give us the option for 800 on voice to help fill in gaps initially until they come back and finish out the upgrades.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

i know what you mean! i would say about half of the towers i've seen myself around here are "non-traditional" towers. From what i have been reading on here i'm guessing there are 2 scenarios that will play out for our market.

 

1) all sites are GMO installs and then sometime later they will come back and do a full build with new panels on as many towers as they can, regardless of what kind of tower.

 

2) all non-traditional sites are GMO installs and all traditional sites are full builds and then they come back later and convert all of the GMO sites they can to full builds.

 

while option 1 would obviously give us improved 3G and 4G everywhere i'm hoping for option 2 as the full builds with RRUs will help increase signal and will also give us the option for 800 on voice to help fill in gaps initially until they come back and finish out the upgrades.

 

We have a map located in the Premier Sponsor section of all the GMO sites in the Central Iowa market. About 1/3 are GMO's by my quick review.

 

Robert via Nexus 7 with Tapatalk HD

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

We have a map located in the Premier Sponsor section of all the GMO sites in the Central Iowa market. About 1/3 are GMO's by my quick review.

 

Robert via Nexus 7 with Tapatalk HD

 

thanks so much for sharing that info! and yay for option 2!!!! :D

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

I am not seeing any work as of yet, but just the mention of Des Moines gives me hope. I am still convinced that one of the towers down the street from me that was added in the last couple years is a network vision site. If you put in 50313 zip code it is close to Cornell St and Broadway. I wouldn't think if they were adding towers they would put up old technology only to overhaul it maybe a year or two later ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am not seeing any work as of yet, but just the mention of Des Moines gives me hope. I am still convinced that one of the towers down the street from me that was added in the last couple years is a network vision site. If you put in 50313 zip code it is close to Cornell St and Broadway. I wouldn't think if they were adding towers they would put up old technology only to overhaul it maybe a year or two later ?

 

unfortunately if it is only a few years old it will be legacy (non NV) equipment. NV didn't start until the last couple of years and towers that are new are planned for a long time before they are actually installed so it still would have been legacy equipment. The only thing it may have going for it is since its newer is they may have used fiber backhaul instead of T1 lines like most of their other towers have.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

If I remember right sprint isn't on that tower. That is the tower that has to be torn down and moved because of the Hy-Vee going in there. Which does bring up the question, what is clearwire going to do about replacing that protection site?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I may have spotted a tower upgrade in progress at the Douglas and beaver tower that was a WiMAX test site.

 

yep i double checked the map, that isn't a sprint tower. So any work you saw was either another carrier or them getting things ready to move that tower or just pulling the equipment off since its being torn down.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.


  • large.unreadcontent.png.6ef00db54e758d06

  • gallery_1_23_9202.png

  • Posts

    • In the conference call they had two question on additional spectrum. One was the 800 spectrum. They are not certain what will happen, thus have not really put it into their plans either way (sale or no sale). They do have a reserve level. Nationwide 800Mhz is seen as great for new technologies which I presume is IOT or 5g slices.  T-Mobile did not bite on use of their c-band or DOD.  mmWave rapidly approaching deadlines not mentioned at all. FWA brushes on this as it deals with underutilized spectrum on a sector by sector basis.  They are willing to take more money to allow FWA to be mobile (think RV or camping). Unsure if this represents a higher priority, for example, FWA Mobile in RVs in Walmart parking lots working where mobile phones need all the capacity. In terms of FWA capacity, their offload strategy is fiber through joint ventures where T-Mobile does the marketing, sales, and customer support while the fiber company does the network planning and installation.  50%-50% financial split not being consolidated into their books. I think discussion of other spectrum would have diluted the fiber joint venture discussion. They do have a fund which one use is to purchase new spectrum. Sale of the 800Mhz would go into this. It should be noted that they continue to buy 2.5Ghz spectrum from schools etc to replace leases. They will have a conference this fall  to update their overall strategies. Other notes from the call are 75% of the phones on the network are 5g. About 85% of their sites have n41, n25, and n71, 90% 5g.  93% of traffic is on midband.  SA is also adding to their performance advantage, which they figure is still ahead of other carriers by two years. It took two weeks to put the auction 108 spectrum to use at their existing sites. Mention was also made that their site spacing was designed for midrange thus no gaps in n41 coverage, while competitors was designed for lowband thus toggles back and forth for n77 also with its shorter range.  
    • The manual network selection sounds like it isn't always scanning NR, hence Dish not showing up. Your easiest way to force Dish is going to be forcing the phone into NR-only mode (*#*#4636#*#* menu?), since rainbow sims don't support SA on T-Mobile.
    • "The company’s unique multi-layer approach to 5G, with dedicated standalone 5G deployed nationwide across 600MHz, 1.9GHz, and 2.5GHz delivers customers a consistently strong experience, with 85% of 5G traffic on sites with all three spectrum bands deployed." Meanwhile they are very close to a construction deadline June 1 for 850Mhz of mmWave in most of Ohio covering 27500-28350Mhz expiring 6/8/2028. No reported sightings.  Buildout notice issue sent by FCC in March 5, 2024 https://wireless2.fcc.gov/UlsApp/letterPdf/LetterPdfController?licId=4019733&letterVersionId=178&autoLetterId=13060705&letterCode=CR&radioServiceCode=UU&op=LetterPdf&licSide=Y&archive=null&letterTo=L  No soecific permits seen in a quick check of Columbus. They also have an additional 200Mhz covering at 24350-25450 Mhz and 24950-25050Mhz with no buildout date expiring 12/11/2029.
    • T-Mobile Delivers Industry-Leading Customer, Service Revenue and Profitability Growth in Q1 2024, and Raises 2024 Guidance https://www.t-mobile.com/news/business/t-mobile-q1-2024-earnings — — — — — I find it funny that when they talk about their spectrum layers they're saying n71, n25, and n41. They're completely avoiding talking about mmWave.
    • Was true in my market. Likely means a higher percentage of 5g phones in your market.
  • Recently Browsing

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...