Network Vision/LTE - Chicago Market

[njjdnt]

 This has gone on for weeks with whatever tower covers State and Jackson for example...you'd think they'd be aware of the problem by now...

Did you report it to Sprint?

[drock2750]

Did you report it to Sprint?

I haven't been reporting problems like this during the NV roll out...I chalk it up to ongoing work. I have to imagine that a tower in the loop that has moved a tiny fraction of the data an adjacent tower has transmitted would show up as a problem at wherever these things are remotely administered. 

[Deval]

There are several sites around the loop that seem to have incredibly slow or completely unusable speeds even with a very strong LTE signal. Once I move around enough to connect to a different tower, the problem disappears. This has gone on for weeks with whatever tower covers State and Jackson for example...you'd think they'd be aware of the problem by now...

 

Have you called in a ticket?

[mhammett]

Woow .I drove thousands time on sycamore rd and I never noticed it .lol .

 

Btw. I saw 2 towers next to each other.a short and a tall one .are both owned by sprint ?

They're owned by American Tower. The only presence by a cellular carrier on the lattice tower is an old microwave dish that US Cellular has. Its license has expired. It likely only carried voice years ago given the channel size and modulation.

 

Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile are on the monopole. Sprint on top, AT&T dish on bottom.

 

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[AMD64]

Short tower is the tower that holds Sprint service. I work in the Monsanto/NIU building next door, soaking in the LTE rays.

Are you a speach therpist ?

[mhammett]

Are you a speach therpist ?

He needs some sort of therapy.

 

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[WiWavelength]

Are you a speach therpist ?

He needs some sort if therapy.

 

If the two of you are lucky, he might be a writing therapist.

 

 

AJ

[mhammett]

My writing is worse than my typing.

 

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[mhammett]

LTE was dead last night in DeKalb. @sprintcare says there's a temporary outage.

 

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[aerxx]

LTE was dead last night in DeKalb. @sprintcare says there's a temporary outage.

 

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That is just DANDY!

[aerxx]

Are you a speach therpist ?

No, NIU's IT Department is also in that building. Along with various other things....

[gusherb]

I went out to Chesterton, IN today for their Saturday "European market" (aka farmers market) and found that LTE was nowhere to be found and EVDO was completely saturated. We later headed over to the Indiana dunes state park, where there was a mile long wait to get into the beach, turned around and headed for a picnic area off of dunes highway to eat our lunch that we had just gotten from the market. While I was driving the call ended up dropping while I had 2-3 bars, but before that happened it turned extremely robotic for about 30 seconds.

 

While at the picnic area I had 2-3 bars and was mostly on 1XRTT. Even EVDO was nowhere to be found, data unusable, even calls and texts took multiple tries to go through. It remained this way until about 20 miles west before I finally picked up LTE again.

One thing I know for sure is that there were TONS of people in this area (Indiana dunes state park/Chesterton) but am perplexed as to why LTE was a no show!? I'm assuming there was some kind of outage. I had no problem 3 months prior at all!

 

Today was the worst experience I've had with sprint since Chicago last September when they were just starting to light up LTE in the city, in fact today was the first time I ever said obscenities and the name sprint together in a sentence. I understand that the area was insanely crowded but even 10-15 miles out with full signal I still had no LTE! (Obviously in places that have been lit up for months)

 

P.S. my brothers nexus 4 on TMO worked just fine the whole time.

[tongboy]

I went out to Chesterton, IN today for their Saturday "European market" (aka farmers market) and found that LTE was nowhere to be found and EVDO was completely saturated. We later headed over to the Indiana dunes state park, where there was a mile long wait to get into the beach, turned around and headed for a picnic area off of dunes highway to eat our lunch that we had just gotten from the market. While I was driving the call ended up dropping while I had 2-3 bars, but before that happened it turned extremely robotic for about 30 seconds.

 

While at the picnic area I had 2-3 bars and was mostly on 1XRTT. Even EVDO was nowhere to be found, data unusable, even calls and texts took multiple tries to go through. It remained this way until about 20 miles west before I finally picked up LTE again.

One thing I know for sure is that there were TONS of people in this area (Indiana dunes state park/Chesterton) but am perplexed as to why LTE was a no show!? I'm assuming there was some kind of outage. I had no problem 3 months prior at all!

 

Today was the worst experience I've had with sprint since Chicago last September when they were just starting to light up LTE in the city, in fact today was the first time I ever said obscenities and the name sprint together in a sentence. I understand that the area was insanely crowded but even 10-15 miles out with full signal I still had no LTE! (Obviously in places that have been lit up for months)

 

P.S. my brothers nexus 4 on TMO worked just fine the whole time.

I think it was some sort of an outage. I have LTE in my house in McHenry county and lost LTE and ehrp for a few hours this afternoon. Interesting that you saw the same thing.

 

Sent from my EVO LTE

 

 

[gusherb]

I went out to Chesterton, IN today for their Saturday "European market" (aka farmers market) and found that LTE was nowhere to be found and EVDO was completely saturated. We later headed over to the Indiana dunes state park, where there was a mile long wait to get into the beach, turned around and headed for a picnic area off of dunes highway to eat our lunch that we had just gotten from the market. While I was driving the call ended up dropping while I had 2-3 bars, but before that happened it turned extremely robotic for about 30 seconds.

 

 

 

While at the picnic area I had 2-3 bars and was mostly on 1XRTT. Even EVDO was nowhere to be found, data unusable, even calls and texts took multiple tries to go through. It remained this way until about 20 miles west before I finally picked up LTE again.

 

One thing I know for sure is that there were TONS of people in this area (Indiana dunes state park/Chesterton) but am perplexed as to why LTE was a no show!? I'm assuming there was some kind of outage. I had no problem 3 months prior at all!

 

 

 

Today was the worst experience I've had with sprint since Chicago last September when they were just starting to light up LTE in the city, in fact today was the first time I ever said obscenities and the name sprint together in a sentence. I understand that the area was insanely crowded but even 10-15 miles out with full signal I still had no LTE! (Obviously in places that have been lit up for months)

 

 

 

P.S. my brothers nexus 4 on TMO worked just fine the whole time.

 

I think it was some sort of an outage. I have LTE in my house in McHenry county and lost LTE and ehrp for a few hours this afternoon. Interesting that you saw the same thing.

 

 

 

Sent from my EVO LTE

 

 

 

 

Yeah that is interesting. And having the insane amounts of traffic on 80/94 on top of thousands at the beach made Sprint a complete nightmare in that area. I wonder if the outage was traffic related though. Once I got near home everything has been normal.

 

I would like to add that since winter EVDO has slowed down a lot since it was first upgraded back in the fall in this area. Everywhere i go during the day I get between 200-800 Kbps down, before I was easily getting over 1 Mbps. I have to wonder if sprint is doing traffic shaping on EVDO now, since I thought most capacity issues were supposed to be fixed with NV. (And they were for awhile)

[gusherb]

Well whatever it is it appears not to have been an outage for me, I just checked the maps here and the two sites in Chesterton are not shown as LTE accepted! (In fact none of the sites heading west show as lte accepted for about 15 miles) The one by route 49 and route 20 I could've sworn showed as being accepted since the fall, and now its not!? I know I had LTE when I was there in April...

[Rocket87]

Well whatever it is it appears not to have been an outage for me, I just checked the maps here and the two sites in Chesterton are not shown as LTE accepted! (In fact none of the sites heading west show as lte accepted for about 15 miles) The one by route 49 and route 20 I could've sworn showed as being accepted since the fall, and now its not!? I know I had LTE when I was there in April...

Just because a site shows lte accepted does not mean it's active. My local tower shows accepted but it's not active and on sprints system called glance shows its scheduled for 4g update and already had 800/1900 3g updated. I also ran into an Ericsson employee who does network maintenance and he said the site is waiting for fiber backhaul before the network vision crew will finish the site.

 

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[Joeynach]

Just because a site shows lte accepted does not mean it's active. My local tower shows accepted but it's not active and on sprints system called glance shows its scheduled for 4g update and already had 800/1900 3g updated. I also ran into an Ericsson employee who does network maintenance and he said the site is waiting for fiber backhaul before the network vision crew will finish the site.

 

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Seems to be the same problem on this board over and over now for months.  NW Indiana, Lake County (IL), Dekalb area.......still waiting on delayed backhaul.  Will it ever end?

[mhammett]

I know the premier site has general backhaul vendors per market, does it have backhaul vendor per site? Is that information available?

[mhammett]

I'm sure some of the backhaul vendors are to blame, but Sprint carries a bunch of bull&*( on their shoulders. One site in a chain of microwave sites has LTE. Okay, so the fiber guys have obviously done what they need to do. The dishes are installed and roughly aligned where they need to be. It has taken months to get all three sites up and they all still aren't. That lies with Sprint (or their subcontractors) right there. It wouldn't do me any good to install some backhaul myself and tell Sprint it's okay to use it. ;-) Trust me, I've thought about it. ;-)

[lilotimz]

I'm sure some of the backhaul vendors are to blame, but Sprint carries a bunch of bull&*( on their shoulders. One site in a chain of microwave sites has LTE. Okay, so the fiber guys have obviously done what they need to do. The dishes are installed and roughly aligned where they need to be. It has taken months to get all three sites up and they all still aren't. That lies with Sprint (or their subcontractors) right there. It wouldn't do me any good to install some backhaul myself and tell Sprint it's okay to use it. ;-) Trust me, I've thought about it. ;-)

 

Backhaul is not delivered by Sprint or its contractors. Backhaul is delivered by the contractors or employees of the local ILEC that has been contracted to do the work. Sprint has no control over anything other than the leased areas on the cell sites. Sprint is at the mercy of whoever they contracted for backhaul. 

[mhammett]

Backhaul is not delivered by Sprint or its contractors. Backhaul is delivered by the contractors or employees of the local ILEC that has been contracted to do the work. Sprint has no control over anything other than the leased areas on the cell sites. Sprint is at the mercy of whoever they contracted for backhaul. 

That is incorrect. Sprint and their subcontractors are 100% responsible for microwave backhaul. The fiber vendor has no control over the microwave network. That is what I was referring to. They have LTE broadcasting from a site and not all towers on that microwave path have LTE in a timely fashion. That's a Sprint problem.

 

Also, the fiber vendor is not always the ILEC. Nationwide, I'd venture to say that a significant amount (if not a majority) of cellular backhaul is done by a non-ILEC provider (Comcast, Windstream - outside of ILEC footprint, Zayo, PEG, Level 3, TW Telecom, Lightpath, etc.).

[mhammett]

This article is a bit dated, but...

 

 

http://www.telecomramblings.com/2012/11/counting-the-on-net-towers/

 

 

CenturyLink is on top, but it doesn't break them down into ILEC and non-ILEC portions. It is indeed missing a couple big ILECs, but just gives some numbers for the others.

[Joeynach]

Man what happened to the NV and LTE lite up process in the Loop.  On Jan 29th, 2013 there were five sites completed and accepted with LTE.  In May things really picked up, eight new LTE sites came on in the Loop to make a total of 13 (out of 25).  Here we are 1.5 months later and we are still stuck on the same 13 sites complete with LTE.  Progress stalled in June, not much was really added the last four weeks, anyone know why?  Halfway better than nothing, but still a ways to go.

 

On a positive note, the tower in Lake View a the corner of Ashland and School is finally finally showing up as 3G only on the NV sites complete.  Hopefully it's LTE light up is just around the corner.  This is the last remaining tower int he Lake View area that I have seen not get its NV upgrades so hopefully this ends soon and we can close the book on Lakeview and Lincoln Park.

 

P.S.  I am calling the Loop and the 25 total cell sites the area from Congress/LSD/Ohio/90-94.

[gr8nuguy]

My guess is its back haul related

 

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[bitslizer]

I was in the indiana dunes/light house outlet area on Friday July 5th and did not have LTE signal either.

 

On another subject, anybody else noticing the LTE speed in Chicago metro have dropped like a rock these past week or 2? I never exceed 2mbps anymore....