South Florida 4G LTE Rollout?

[bitbang3r]

Well, it looks like they're actively working on things again today. I did some major testing near the intersection of Pines Boulevard & Flamingo Road (Pembroke Pines), near the Pembroke Pines police/fire department (which appears to be the mother-of-all local Sprint towers, ringed by round Clear wimax antennas pointing equally in every direction), and near Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport (FXE), by Commercial Blvd & Prospect.

 

For all intents and purposes, Flamingo-Pines had no meaningful EVDO service around 9am. It sputtered to life every few minutes, but a phone without wimax would have had basically no data service at that location this morning.

 

The Pembroke Pines fire/police tower seemed almost as bad, but literally 30 seconds before I was about to drive away and head to work, I got about a minute of pure nirvana... ~1800kbps down, roughly the same up. Then it deteriorated down to ~800kbps both ways, and stayed there for a few minutes.

 

I did some more random tests along the Turnpike, 595, and 95 between Pines Blvd. and Commercial Blvd, but EVDO appeared to be mostly dead until I got to Broward Blvd, at which point it surged without warning back up to ~600-800kbps down before collapsing again just north of Oakland Park Blvd.

 

The area by FXE off Commercial is like Pines-Flamingo... basically no functioning EVDO service as of around 10am. In fact, something in the phone's network stack apparently crashed so badly between the time I got off I-95 at Commercial & got to my office by FXE, I couldn't even connect to WI-FI at the office without rebooting. I've noticed that Android phones definitely seem to have a real problem dealing with scenarios where there's solid RF-connectivity, but poor/no backhaul connectivity (it appears many things just check to see whether the network is "up", without testing to see whether it actually "works", and fail catastrophically when it ends up in a state of having solid "local-loop" wireless connectivity, but can't reliably reach the internet itself).

 

Were it not for the knowledge that Sprint is actively working on their network upgrades right this minute, I'd be fuming... but since they are, it's more like schadenfreude and morbid curiosity ;-)

[Jaggrey]

Well this thread has been a blessing! I'm glad to hear they're starting work on it. A friend of mine is a tower tech in this area and mentioned they were starting to work on things also. I get pretty decent speeds in the UM area but it would be nice for it to be consistent everywhere.

[Fifth313ment]

row row row your boat gently down the gulf stream.... merrily merrily...... words.

What is wrong with you? You come into just about every post and bash the op or simply talk gibberish!? Go away or simply don't enter into posts which have NOTHING to do with you. And as flycuban said Homestead is not a haul unless you're talking about from Fort Lauderdale. It is simply South Miami-Dade county. Traffic is really what makes driving in and between points in South Florida as it can take me sometimes 20 minutes to go to my nearest supermarket which is just a block away.

 

Also my house is located in 33319 and there are 5-6 towers which my phone usually tries to ping off of. There is a really big tower on Rock Island and NW 44TH street but how do I tell whether any work has been done yet? Like I had said in a previous posts my speeds have gotten better but my signal hasn't. I still get crappy signal in my house which is why I have an Airave but that is very wonky and I wish I didn't have to use it. Will the Network Vision upgrades improve my signals?

[S4GRU]

Also my house is located in 33319 and there are 5-6 towers which my phone usually tries to ping off of. There is a really big tower on Rock Island and NW 44TH street but how do I tell whether any work has been done yet? Like I had said in a previous posts my speeds have gotten better but my signal hasn't. I still get crappy signal in my house which is why I have an Airave but that is very wonky and I wish I didn't have to use it. Will the Network Vision upgrades improve my signals?

 

Network Vision 3G signals will travel up to 20% farther than legacy 3G signals. The reason is Sprint is using RRU's, which are remote radios right behind the antenna panels.

 

How much will actually be noticed at a site varies from location to location. In some cases, the coverage distance may increase up to 20%. However, every antenna panel has downtilt. If the downtilt is at a rather steep angle, then there will be virtually no increase in coverage from that site. However, the signal within the coverage area will get up to 20% stronger.

 

No matter how you slice it, Network Vision will be bring more coverage area and stronger signals. How much stronger is highy variable based on where you are at.

 

Robert

[danielholt]

merrily merrily merrily merrily freedoms but a dream

[danielholt]

with traffic, homestead is a haul from miami. im from florida, and so is my uncle. I dont bash the OP either, we play golf on the weekends.

[Fifth313ment]

Flycuban did you ever get more info on those trucks? Any new sites you've noticed? Who does all the work on the 3G towers being done in South Florida? How can they make more then 700+ fixes to the network so fast (six months)? What does the Sprint system say about where the first LTE towers will be pout in South Florida, cities?

 

5th