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Network Vision/LTE - Long Island Market


RoccoM

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Last night my home tower completely shut down for a few hours. As a result my GS9 was bouncing between 2 or 3 different near my house but only a 1x or 1x800 signal. I think at one point it went to Verizon 1x. since these 1x signal were so weak I wondered what my Essential Phone was connecting to since the RF performance its terrible. To my surprise it was connected to Clearwire B2, which means it was T-Mobile. I was really surprised that T-Mobile roaming was live for these types of situation and for the LI market. I would have though it was a tower by tower basis like T-mobiles roaming with At&t.The essential phone also connected to Clearwire B4. Speeds were around 30 to 50 Mbps so its seem like roaming is not throttled at all. Keep in mind this was am so that's why speeds were that fast. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...
Upgrades are going well on LI. Noticed more Small Cells and B41 upgrades. Also got this in Freeport NY 62e2cd6061df505074febbae60ed660f.jpg

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Hey that’s 5G!!! At least that’s what AT&T would say [emoji23]


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Funny enough these are faster than what I've seen from Att's "5G"
So not LI related but I've been testing ATT in Queens and Manhattan. I've been using an essential phone. Either is isn't a lot of B30 or it just has bad range. B41 is way more common on Sprint. Also speeds in general are a fraction of what Sprint reaches in the same areas. Although the Essential Phone doesn't have 4x4 MIMO and only has 3XCA. Pretty sure AT&T uses 4 or 5 xCA now. Also not sure about 256QAM on the Essential

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1 hour ago, mirskyc said:

So not LI related but I've been testing ATT in Queens and Manhattan. I've been using an essential phone. Either is isn't a lot of B30 or it just has bad range. 

I've found that here in Seattle, AT&T's L2300 has less range than Sprint's L2500 without HPUE. With HPUE it's not even a competition. I think it's because their deployment is 4x4 and the equipment they're using isn't as good as what Sprint is using. Additionally, since L2300 is a relatively fragile airlink (due to the high frequency) and only deployed at 10x10 (or sometimes even 5x5), hanoff parameters are set so devices drop connection at relatively high signal levels. 

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Broke my all time high speed test today in Oceanside NY2862c2d129df1e642fde0e11b9ed0dee.jpg

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edit: just realized it wasn't my record when i scrolled up. It just happened to be my record on my Galaxy S10 

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  • 2 years later...

Reviving this thread!

Sprint eNB 57506 is now T-Mobile eNB 478361. This was formerly the main Sprint site covering Roosevelt Field Mall. With the addition of this site, T-Mobile now has ~3 macros covering the mall in addition to a DAS. 

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Went out to Huntington for brunch. Great speeds on both LTE and 5G on T-Mobile and Verizon. 2CA on T-Mobile LTE and 3CA on Verizon LTE. 

T-Mobile

G8qjjzA.pngrZWolfO.png

— — — — —

Verizon

cucYvfe.jpgC4EaR73.jpg

— — — — —

Also forgot to mention that when I was passing through Woodbury, NY I saw a ton of little omnidirectional antennas on a bunch of the utility poles along Woodbury Road. I couldn't pull over to determine who they belonged to but from the looks of Cellmapper, both carriers use them throughout the town. For example, I believe this one belongs to T-Mobile.

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On 9/3/2022 at 4:48 PM, Paynefanbro said:

Went out to Huntington for brunch. Great speeds on both LTE and 5G on T-Mobile and Verizon. 2CA on T-Mobile LTE and 3CA on Verizon LTE

— —

Also forgot to mention that when I was passing through Woodbury, NY I saw a ton of little omnidirectional antennas on a bunch of the utility poles along Woodbury Road. I couldn't pull over to determine who they belonged to but from the looks of Cellmapper, both carriers use them throughout the town. For example, I believe this one belongs to T-Mobile.

Crown Castle has been blanketing the North Shore of Long Island for a few years now with those types of small cells. At the moment no T-Mobile 5G on any of them from what I can see although the R15 indicator does broadcast from them so it seems like to normal users the area is fully 5g covered.

Link below shows some of the most recent additions but there are way more than shown on that map. I remember checking that link a year or so ago and it was full of totally different locations.

https://www.crowncastle.com/communities/long-island-ny#:~:text=Long Island%2C NY&text=In Long Island%2C we built,vehicles and citywide data sharing.

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Here's a funny one. We all know how T-Mobile has those weird macro sites on wooden utility poles at PSEG substations throughout Long Island. eNB 45861 is one of those sites and eNB 219507/219508 is a Sprint conversion on a radio tower 500ft away. I always wondered what T-Mobile would do to upgrade them. In this case T-Mobile just skipped upgrading it completely. The new site is taller and actually has all bands available so it's 100% worth it.

dQ6DlVx.png

According to Cellmapper no one has connected to eNB 45861 since July 2022. T-Mobile likely took it offline since it's a redundant site but as of Oct 2022 the antennas were still up.

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Went back out to Roosevelt Field Mall and the experience was spectacular as usual. I'm running iOS 16.4 with the Standalone 5G toggle on. I wasn't able to connect to SA n41 but I did connect to SA n71. Now that we're at 3 fully upgraded macros covering the mall, performance on SA n71 is pretty good. Long gone are the early days of standalone 5G where if you got stuck on it you could barely get over 10Mbps. With only 10MHz I was seeing ~45Mbps. NSA n41 was also great at ~350Mbps inside and out.

One thing I noticed is that my T-Mobile iPhone absolutely refused to connect to the carrier neutral DAS inside the mall unless I switched to LTE-only mode. In past years my phone would connect to the DAS and drop 5G completely but it seems like my phone preferred 5G this time around. On the other hand, the Verizon iPhone 14 that I had on me stayed on the LTE DAS the entire time.  What this meant was that on T-Mobile I'd experience "inconsistencies" in performance as my phone switched between super fast n41 and the slower but still usable n71 while the Verizon phone stayed at a consistent ~200Mbps via the DAS. The second I switched my T-Mobile iPhone to LTE, I saw those same ~200Mbps LTE speeds. 

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Drove out to the Hamptons today and mapped at least 3 new T-Mobile sites that haven't been seen before. I don't know exactly where the sites are but it doesn't look like any of them are Sprint conversions which means T-Mobile is doing new builds in Suffolk County to densify their network.

eNB ID 331116
eNB ID 343773
eNB ID 331114

Also at least 1 new AT&T site, eNB ID 116457 

— — —

Also in the latest iOS 16.4 beta it seems like my phone more reliably sticks to standalone 5G. For most of the drive from Brooklyn to Sag Harbor I stayed on n41 with a handful of drops to n71 and I only dropped to LTE twice, both times due to being at cell edge and only having 1 bar. T-Mobile is getting insane range out of n41 too, likely due to aggregating n71 with n41 more reliably in the latest update. Not only was SA range great but so were speeds. Even on 1 bar of n41 I was seeing upwards of 100Mbps. I'm really enjoying all of the improvements standalone 5G is bringing.

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  • 4 months later...

Mapped a bunch of the North Shore/Gold Coast on Cellmapper because I noticed that it was undermapped specifically for AT&T. I managed to log a couple of sites that weren't mapped before as well as locate a bunch that were significantly off from their locations due to being seen super far away. For example, the pin for AT&T eNB 115975 sat unconfirmed for 6 years and was stuck on the Throgs Neck Bridge but in reality it was 5.5 miles away in Sands Point. Another good example was eNB 110233 which was unconfirmed since 2020 and it's pin was stuck in Larchmont, NY when in reality the site was 6.5 miles across the Long Island Sound in Port Washington.

As far as my experience with mapping AT&T and T-Mobile goes, what I've found is that pretty much each of the Big 3 are collocated on all of the same macros throughout the region. This means that in most areas you'll have similar coverage no matter what carrier you're on. What makes the difference in performance is how much spectrum is available. In the areas where only lowband reaches, AT&T is faster than T-Mobile at similar signal strengths due to AT&T having 10MHz Band 12/14/n5 whereas T-Mobile has 5MHz Band 12 and 15MHz n71. If you're within range of midband though T-Mobile absolutely clobbers AT&T.

The only areas where the carriers aren't collocated are the downtowns/commercial areas of the towns, villages, and hamlets of the North Shore. In those areas, T-Mobile had n41 90% of the time whereas AT&T barely had any C-band coverage. When I did connect, it was decently fast at ~250Mbps but in those same areas I'd be seeing >700Mbps on T-Mobile.

Another thing that separates T-Mobile and Verizon from AT&T is the use of small cells. All throughout the North Shore you'll find T-Mobile and Verizon small cells that fill in coverage where macros can't simply don't reach. With AT&T that isn't the case at all. It's a surprising departure from their m/o in NYC where they seemingly deploy 3 small cells for every macro. The best example of this difference in performance is Oyster Bay Road and Chicken Valley Road in Mill Neck and Matinecock. Both of these roads are barely covered by the macros that are meant to serve them. On AT&T I was seeing signals as low as -125dbm on Band 14 with throughput of <1Mbps, often cutting out completely. On T-Mobile in these same areas I was getting a strong signal and ~200Mbps thanks to all of the small cells.

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