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Sprint TD-LTE 2500/2600mhz Discussion


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I just got an ephemeral LTE Band 41 connection in far exurban Chicagoland. RSRP between -109 & -120 dBm, unable to get data to transfer. Then the Netgear dropped back to Band 25, from a different site about 2 miles away. I believe the Band 41 site is a Clear-only tower with WiMAX, about 1 mile distant.

 

Was this real? Was it a test? Am I hallucinating? I drove within 300 feet of the suspect site yesterday, and got not even a hint of LTE signal.

 

I can pick up a WiMAX signal of about the same strength, likely from the same tower, on my decommisioned HTC EVO, but I was never able to get reliable data from it at this location, either.

Get your MSL code for your hotspot and put it into Band 41 only mode. In my experience in Denver, TD-LTE 2600 was going considerably farther than WiMax from the same site. I sometimes would get usable TD-LTE with a -120 to -130dBm RSRP signal. In the 2-5Mbps range.

 

Robert from Note 2 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

 

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Do we know the current capacity of the microwave backhaul at Clearwire sites?  I wonder if Clearwire setup their backhaul to be scaleable.

 

For fiber sites, there wouldn't be any publicly available information. For microwave sites, their FCC license would have the capacity of the links, but if there are multiple paths from a site to fiber, it gets very complicated to know the "capacity" at the site.

 

Imagine what the higher ups in AT&T and VZW are thinking right now. " How did they get there before we did, we are bigger, it's not fair, they cheated"

 

Sent from my SPH-L900 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

 

Well, "we" had 4G before they did, so it shouldn't be that surprising.

Ah, ok. Does 802.11ac have the same max speed as N?

 

 

Sent from Josh's iPhone 5 using Tapatalk 2

 

Faster. Some is due to channel size, some is due to the number of spacial streams, some is due to more complex modulations, some due to...

It was running N. I thought N maxed out at 300Mbps?

 

Robert from Note 2 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

 

A 20 MHz channel single stream does 75 megabit over the air rate. Actual throughput is typically half of the over the air rate. Larger (or smaller) channels and the number of streams scales linearly.

What's the word? Is Clearwire still using microwave for backhaul for the TD LTE sites? I would've thought an upgrade to fiber would be needed at least if the towers are going to have both Wimax and TD LTE...

 

A single microwave link is more than capable of supplying the bandwidth at a given site to all carriers on all bands using the latest technologies. Well, for one hop anyway. ;-)

What's the backhaul speed of the microwave connection?

 

Varies. The ULS would have that information.

10GB / channel x 3 Channels

 

That's a LOT of throughput. A large B means bytes, eight times larger than bits. There are no commercial grade microwave systems capable of even 10 gigabit/s.

That sounds pretty good in comparison. I thought the Sprint NV LTE sites only had 100 mbps connection for backhaul (with possible upgrade to 1 Gbps)

That's all they currently need. I'm not sure if the exact radio models they're using are capable of more or not. They certainly used smaller dishes (lower possible reliable throughput) than I would have used.

 

 I don't see how.. Only 100 Mb/s ?  If you're downloading at 7 Mb/s on a single phone ( which is typical for LTE ) you'd only have enough bandwidth for a dozen phones on that tower...

Welcome to all consumer grade services everywhere.

 

Question for the experts. Since back haul is a huge reason sprint is lagging behind in NV deployment of lte, is it possible it can share back haul with clear wire on those sites where they currently co-locate. I mean won't it be like that eventually when they eliminate redundant clear sites anyway. This way maybe some lte can be turned on sooner then later and then get even more back haul once Triband phones come online. I think backhaul repurposed for 1900 is more important than 2600 right now. Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

Technically possible, yes. If capacity is available...

 

It makes sense if they aren't using it, but it would be feasible to get gigabit to run maybe 2 or 3 towers via microwave rather than pay for 3 300 megabit connections.

 

That's how they do it now in many areas. A single gig circuit is much more cost effective than 3x 300 megabit connections.

Excellent point, they could run a full gbit backhaul to a 'core' tower, then daisy chain microwave links off that to whatever other towers that are not necessarily as easy/cheap to get fiber to.

*nods*

 

1. A single optical fiber can theoretically carry in excess of 10 Gbps. Fiber optic providers typically run fibers in bundles. Thus, once the fiber optic cable (bundle) has been run to any given site, there is an enormous amount of bandwidth available to that site, dependent on the electronic interfaces installed at each end of the fiber. Thus, ramping up backhaul to very large numbers is easy, once the fiber is in place (remembering that the fiber providers' monthly charges are based on capacity connected, not just on a per-fiber basis).

 

2. In a number of places (for example, the Chicago exurbs), Sprint has planned to bring fiber to a hub site, and then use microwave links to tie other sites into the fiber at the hub, thus saving time and money. Where the fiber has been run in a timely fashion (I think much of Rockford, Illinois, is an example), this tactic has worked well. However, the fiber backhaul providers have not always installed the backhaul in a timely fashion (for example, Dekalb and McHenry counties in Illinois), which has left large clusters of NV-ready sites with only old backhaul, and thus with no LTE. Also, with fiber to a hub and MW to the spokes, you have possibilities for "common mode" failures affecting large clusters of sites.

 

I believe people in other threads have suggested that Sprint is revisiting the "fiber-to-microwave" tactic since the SoftBank consummation.

A single fiber can do much, much more than 10 gigabits. There are 40 gigabit and 100 gigabit Ethernet standards. DWDM can multiplex dozens, if not hundreds of channels on a single pair.

 

THat's true of a hub-and-spoke method, but they could just as well have diverse links off of the towers. I try not to engineer any of my towers to have less than two links to other towers. I prefer three. They could even have different fiber vendors in each microwave mesh area for an additional layer of protection.

 

I just got an ephemeral LTE Band 41 connection in far exurban Chicagoland. RSRP between -109 & -120 dBm, unable to get data to transfer. Then the Netgear dropped back to Band 25, from a different site about 2 miles away. I believe the Band 41 site is a Clear-only tower with WiMAX, about 1 mile distant.

 

Was this real? Was it a test? Am I hallucinating? I drove within 300 feet of the suspect site yesterday, and got not even a hint of LTE signal.

 

I can pick up a WiMAX signal of about the same strength, likely from the same tower, on my decommisioned HTC EVO, but I was never able to get reliable data from it at this location, either.

Where, geographically?

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Some thoughts that missed that last post...

 

Millimeter wave (60 - 90 GHz) gear will be the first to do 10 gigabit/s, but that's not for a year or two yet. That gear is only good for 1 - 3 miles.

 

Also, the maximum throughputs people are talking about are only valid under great RF conditions. I'd be surprised if the 95th percentile on their backhaul feeding a non-BRS\EBS site would exceed 125 megabit. If the radio is capable of 37 megabit, but you're the only one on it and can only pull 10 megabit (assuming sufficient network and server capacity), there is no extra 27 megabit sitting unused. Your poor modulation levels are consuming 100% of the radio's time to deliver that 10 megabit.

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I just got an ephemeral LTE Band 41 connection in far exurban Chicagoland. RSRP between -109 & -120 dBm, unable to get data to transfer. Then the Netgear dropped back to Band 25, from a different site about 2 miles away. I believe the Band 41 site is a Clear-only tower with WiMAX, about 1 mile distant.

 

Was this real? Was it a test? Am I hallucinating? I drove within 300 feet of the suspect site yesterday, and got not even a hint of LTE signal.

 

I can pick up a WiMAX signal of about the same strength, likely from the same tower, on my decommisioned HTC EVO, but I was never able to get reliable data from it at this location, either.

 

Where, geographically?

 

The south side of Crystal Lake.  The suspect Clear site is just north of Ackman Road and about 200' west of Huntley Road.  I am somewhat northeast.  My house has aluminum siding, which significantly limits 2500 MHz penetration.

 

BTW, thanks for your cogent replies and expansions in the lenghty post that I quoted from.  It is very helpful to get information from someone who actually has the knowlege that the rest of us are looking for!

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Just got 2500 LTE again, this time held the signal long enough to get speed tests. RSRP about -114 to -120. I haven't figured out how to get the hotspot to seek only band 41, but I will do so later today. Now bouncing back and forth between bands 41 & 25. I am fringe for both, so it is hard to get a solid connection.

 

Added: Some representative speeds & feeds, same indoors location:

 

Band 41 @ 11:21 am: 6684 kbps down,  357 kbps up, 108 ms ping

Band 41 @ 11:42 am: 7005 kbps down, 1098 kbps up, 88 ms ping

Band 25 @ 11:51 am: 962 kbps down, 413 kbps up, 100 ms ping

 

The Band 25 location is likely Pyott Road, Lake in the Hills, IL, about 3 miles distant.  I have gotten 35-36 Mbps from that site on my GS3 when standing about 400 feet from it.

 

Even with a VERY sketchy connection, the Band 41 numbers are amazing.

NetgearZing.jpg

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Anyone know if there is a non-Netgear USB stick coming?

Nope, nothing yet. I'm watching the FCC page daily though.

 

 

Sent from Josh's iPhone 5 using Tapatalk 2

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To be honest, I'm really waiting for FreedomPOP to have one as these are for really low bandwidth applications, but I'm sure that Sprint will have it before FreedomPOP does. Why a tri-band LTE when I need low throughput? Well, 800 MHz support for penetration and device parity for when I want high throughput. The bulk of them would go on routers for out-of-band management, but some would go in a sort of mega-hotspot. I'd have USB dongles or mini-PCIExpress cards from multiple networks in the same router for higher throughput and resiliency. ;-)

 

 

Oh, and I'd rather not buy anything Netgear. I've had bad luck with them in the past.

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Oh, and I'd rather not buy anything Netgear. I've had bad luck with them in the past.

 

The two Netgear tri band LTE devices for Sprint are basically Sierra Wireless tech wrapped in Netgear clothing.  They were in development before Netgear completed its acquisition of Sierra.

 

AJ

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Netgear ruined the readynas line, I was worried about the zing myself until robert got one and started reporting on it.

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The two Netgear tri band LTE devices for Sprint are basically Sierra Wireless tech wrapped in Netgear clothing.  They were in development before Netgear completed its acquisition of Sierra.

 

AJ

Oh, so like Linksys and Sipura? I'd never have anything Linksys, but anything that Sipura had done before the Cisco\Linksys purchase was game.

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Netgear ruined the readynas line, I was worried about the zing myself until robert got one and started reporting on it.

Tell me about it. I hate my ReadyNAS. What a piece of shit.

 

Beyond that, I try to stay away from Netgear as well.

 

 

Sent from my Sprint iPhone 5, not the old one (using Tapatalk 2).

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Has anyone heard about clearwire equipment?

 

Do you think Sprint will just shut down the home internet part of Clearwire and convert everything to Sprint phones and hot spots?

It would seem to me that Clear will probably run as its own company for the foreseeable future. I doubt it's name will change. Lots will change internally for Clearwire, but I doubt they'll change their core biz plan of wireless home Internet. I'm sure Sprint will eventually move all of Clearwire's customers off WiMax and onto LTE, at some point. Which will be awesome for Clearwire customers. I wonder if the new modems will be Tri-band or just 2500/2600mhz TD-LTE????

 

 

Sent from my Sprint iPhone 5, not the old one (using Tapatalk 2).

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 It would seem to me that Clear will probably run as its own company for the foreseeable future. I doubt it's name will change. Lots will change internally for Clearwire, but I doubt they'll change their core biz plan of wireless home Internet. I'm sure Sprint will eventually move all of Clearwire's customers off WiMax and onto LTE, at some point. Which will be awesome for Clearwire customers. I wonder if the new modems will be Tri-band or just 2500/2600mhz TD-LTE????

 

 

 

 

I hope for both soon!!! do you know how long it takes to get my monthy average of 250G down WiMax!!!!

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For fiber sites, there wouldn't be any publicly available information. For microwave sites, their FCC license would have the capacity of the links, but if there are multiple paths from a site to fiber, it gets very complicated to know the "capacity" at the site.

 

 

Well, "we" had 4G before they did, so it shouldn't be that surprising.

 

Faster. Some is due to channel size, some is due to the number of spacial streams, some is due to more complex modulations, some due to...

 

A 20 MHz channel single stream does 75 megabit over the air rate. Actual throughput is typically half of the over the air rate. Larger (or smaller) channels and the number of streams scales linearly.

 

A single microwave link is more than capable of supplying the bandwidth at a given site to all carriers on all bands using the latest technologies. Well, for one hop anyway. ;-)

 

Varies. The ULS would have that information.

 

That's a LOT of throughput. A large B means bytes, eight times larger than bits. There are no commercial grade microwave systems capable of even 10 gigabit/s.

That's all they currently need. I'm not sure if the exact radio models they're using are capable of more or not. They certainly used smaller dishes (lower possible reliable throughput) than I would have used.

 

Welcome to all consumer grade services everywhere.

 

Technically possible, yes. If capacity is available...

 

 

That's how they do it now in many areas. A single gig circuit is much more cost effective than 3x 300 megabit connections.

*nods*

 

A single fiber can do much, much more than 10 gigabits. There are 40 gigabit and 100 gigabit Ethernet standards. DWDM can multiplex dozens, if not hundreds of channels on a single pair.

 

THat's true of a hub-and-spoke method, but they could just as well have diverse links off of the towers. I try not to engineer any of my towers to have less than two links to other towers. I prefer three. They could even have different fiber vendors in each microwave mesh area for an additional layer of protection.

 

Where, geographically?

 

What bandwidth will a NV LTE tower (  fiber obviously ) versus a Sprint 3G tower now ?

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It would seem to me that Clear will probably run as its own company for the foreseeable future. I doubt it's name will change. Lots will change internally for Clearwire, but I doubt they'll change their core biz plan of wireless home Internet. I'm sure Sprint will eventually move all of Clearwire's customers off WiMax and onto LTE, at some point. Which will be awesome for Clearwire customers. I wonder if the new modems will be Tri-band or just 2500/2600mhz TD-LTE????

 

 

Sent from my Sprint iPhone 5, not the old one (using Tapatalk 2).

Actually, Clearwire has been quietly shutting down retail stores and been getting away from a home business model. I don't expect Sprint to sell TD-LTE as a home ISP at all. I think they'll let home WiMax users stay until the network ends in 2015. But they probably will stop seeking new WiMax ISP users.

 

Robert from Note 2 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

 

 

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What bandwidth will a NV LTE tower (  fiber obviously ) versus a Sprint 3G tower now ?

I'm just guessing at what you're asking here, but in my review of microwave licenses, Sprint is allocating 100 megabit per site. I'd imagine that applies anywhere. I'd imagine that would scale up linearly with the number of LTE radios per site.

 

Legacy? Now I'd imagine it's all over the board. A single T1 up to several T1s.

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Actually, Clearwire has been quietly shutting down retail stores and been getting away from a home business model. I don't expect Sprint to sell TD-LTE as a home ISP at all. I think they'll let home WiMax users stay until the network ends in 2015. But they probably will stop seeking new WiMax ISP users.

 

Robert from Note 2 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

Clear is still advertising in this area, Just got a flyer in the mail this week and looked it over until i realized it wasn't a very good deal

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Short of a test lab situation, you are not apt to see a three sector site with a 5 MHz FDD LTE carrier ever be called upon to deliver a consistent 7 Mbps per user to a dozen UEs.  That basically would require an even distribution at four users per sector.  Since the total of 28 Mbps per sector would be pushing the 37 Mbps max of the 5 MHz FDD carrier, each UE would need to be in similarly excellent RF conditions to support 64-QAM and 2x2 MIMO.  And each user would have to be constantly requesting downlink data at 7 Mbps rates or greater.  Those are real world circumstances unlikely to occur.

 

AJ

I crunched numbers and it's making alittle more sense.  You gotta take into consideration when you stream on a big tv it's using much more bandwidth then watching Netflix on a small screen like a smartphone.  For example: Data consumption on Netflix varies, because video quality adjusts constantly depending on your connection. In  tests using  LTE - 10 minutes of viewing used up between 100 and 200MB ( much lower then on your widescreen ). 

 

Streaming only 100 MB ( this is lower quality ) for 10 minutes ..In which  100 MB is equal to 800 Mb .. means that  one person is using 1.3 Mb/ second. Since you're using sustained data ( but most people aren't ) it's easier to see how this spectrum is working.. because at first I was like NO WAY ! haha

 

This actually makes sense because before NV rollouts began - My Sprint 3G service used to be able to stream perfect to Netlflix on my phone.

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I'm just guessing at what you're asking here, but in my review of microwave licenses, Sprint is allocating 100 megabit per site. I'd imagine that applies anywhere. I'd imagine that would scale up linearly with the number of LTE radios per site.

 

Legacy? Now I'd imagine it's all over the board. A single T1 up to several T1s.

Thank you for that information.  100 Mb on LTE sounds good.. 

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I'm not sure if you understand, or maybe I'm not being clear in my explanation... Sprint is using a single 5x5 MHz carrier for their LTE right now. This one carrier has a capacity, and maximum speed, of 37 Mbps. It doesn't matter how much of a pipeline behind it, the 10 MHz of airwaves can't deliver any more than that, period.

 

The reason that you multiply that by three is that Sprint typically splits sites (towers) in to three "sectors". Imagine you've got a circle going out from a cell site, and split it in to three evenly-sized "triangles", so you cover 360 degrees with three 120 degree sectors. Make sense?

 

So, since you have a maximum of 37 Mbps (little b, megabits), times three for three sectors, you get a theoretical maximum capacity of 111 Mbps. You can put 1000 Mbps behind that and it won't make it any faster. A single cell site using 10 MHz (5x5) of FD-LTE literally cannot go any faster.

 

Now, Sprint is also putting another 5x5 on the old Nextel frequency (800 MHz ESMR), so double the capacity right there. That's 20 MHz total, using ~222 Mbps theoretical maximum.

 

Thanks this is good information, much clearer now..

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Clear is still advertising in this area, Just got a flyer in the mail this week and looked it over until i realized it wasn't a very good deal

 

Yes, they will continue to advertise WiMax service, but not through retail stores.  Only through their website.  You might as well make money on it, and use all those devices you've purchased.  But it was already slowly being phased out by Clearwire.  It will likely be even accelerated under Sprint.

 

Robert

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Actually, Clearwire has been quietly shutting down retail stores and been getting away from a home business model. I don't expect Sprint to sell TD-LTE as a home ISP at all. I think they'll let home WiMax users stay until the network ends in 2015. But they probably will stop seeking new WiMax ISP users.

 

Robert from Note 2 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

 

I wonder if that's a main reason they changed the price plans.  It used to be a contract and lease the modem.  Now it's 50.00 for the modem and pre-pay as you go.

 

That way if and when they decide to shut it down,, there is no contracts to have to worry about keeping the system up for.

 

Quick exit.  But I'm keeping my fingers crossed anyway.  I'm one of the few in the nitch group that dosent have much other options for ISP,,, at least for now.  And I loved the fact that when the family ran up to Grandma's,, who dosent have internet,, I just unplug the modem here,, plug in there,, and all the laptops are fired up and ready to go.  I complain about the speed all the time,, but they did have some good points too.

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