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Network Vision/LTE - New York City Market


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1 hour ago, thisischuck01 said:

Screenshot_20200927-200856.jpgScreenshot_20200927-200725.jpg

Seeing so much extra capacity with these oDAS upgrades. Near City College - eNB 59919, Sector 11 (though every oDAS node I've run across north of 110 has been upgraded).

Surprised that they're going for LAA instead of mmWave.

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2 hours ago, Paynefanbro said:

Surprised that they're going for LAA instead of mmWave.

IIRC, NYC regulations lead to a pretty restricted DAS network - thus lots of hardware limitations. You go to any other major city and you'll see multi-sector small cells with higher-order MIMO. Here we're stuck with 2x2 MIMO omni-directional nodes (with the Transit Wireless system being even more limited).

AFAIK, mmWave isn't compatible with the current oDAS hardware. LAA likely fell under the umbrella of "relatively close to what we're already broadcasting", and that's why they were able to deploy.

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1 hour ago, thisischuck01 said:

IIRC, NYC regulations lead to a pretty restricted DAS network - thus lots of hardware limitations. You go to any other major city and you'll see multi-sector small cells with higher-order MIMO. Here we're stuck with 2x2 MIMO omni-directional nodes (with the Transit Wireless system being even more limited).

AFAIK, mmWave isn't compatible with the current oDAS hardware. LAA likely fell under the umbrella of "relatively close to what we're already broadcasting", and that's why they were able to deploy.

That actually explains a lot. I thought that the dense macro footprint alone is why every carrier in NYC seemed to be relying pretty much exclusively on macros for mmWave but now it makes much more sense.

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Was able to get the fastest 5G speedtest yet on one of the site near me. Turns out the 2 closest site to me received N41 upgrades but from inside I don't connect to either, I connect to the 3rd closest which only has N71. The 2nd screenshot is a N71 speed test, I've gotten faster download but that upload really stood out. Talk about congestion [emoji1787]e0a350ee0c83730793fe4302dad3d23b.jpgfe123ccccf1be5343fc9fb6c15ecc3c7.jpg

Sent from my SM-G988U1 using Tapatalk

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No n41 or n71 on my home tower just yet but I got these speeds from it while indoors. Typically I get 120-150Mbps from this site and can hit 200Mbps+ after midnight. Part of me thinks T-Mobile may have increased backhaul on the site in anticipation of n41 work being done soon. 

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I was working from home today and noticed that my phone signal went from full bars down to 1-2 bars in my house. I caught T-Mobile working on my cell site so it looks like I'm finally getting some 5G goodness!

Edit: It looks like I'm getting n71!

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All done for today since it started drizzling but they tested 600MHz for a short time and my phone connected but they turned it off afterwards.

Today they removed the old Band 12 antennas and replaced them with the newer massive ones that you see in the pics, and they removed that legacy HSPA antenna that was sitting up there unused. They also added some new RRU's behind the Band 2/66 antennas. They left the extra space that the old Band 12 antenna was on empty and moved the Band 2/66 antennas over hopefully in anticipation of the n41 antenna being added sometime soon.

It looks like they left in a hurry though since one of the antennas for Band 2/66 is slightly lopsided. It's not effecting my signal at all but it's weird that they left it that way. This was pretty exciting since it's rare you catch them actually working on your site.

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So I've been noticing in signal check that I've been connecting to T-Mobile band 41 signal and I finally was actually able to latch onto it proper. I was around Penn station on 34th and they definitely have a tower live that's transmitting LTE over band 41.

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6 hours ago, Paynefanbro said:

Looks like T-Mobile decided to do a full site modernization. I'm getting n41 too! 

oJKHnFe.jpg

Did the change the n41 equipment they were using? That looks bigger than other installs I've seen.

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I also wanted to note that the Band 12/71 installation has caused a split eNB to occur however I'm aggregating with Band 2/66 on a different eNB ID just fine which is a first for me.

It also appears that T-Mobile is running both Band 2 and Band 66 off of that single RFS antenna instead of splitting it between two like before. Does that mean no more 4x4MIMO? I did notice that they put new RRUs behind the antenna but I can't identify them. 

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1 hour ago, Paynefanbro said:

I also wanted to note that the Band 12/71 installation has caused a split eNB to occur however I'm aggregating with Band 2/66 on a different eNB ID just fine which is a first for me.

It also appears that T-Mobile is running both Band 2 and Band 66 off of that single RFS antenna instead of splitting it between two like before. Does that mean no more 4x4MIMO? I did notice that they put new RRUs behind the antenna but I can't identify them. 

The new RFS APXVAR18_43-C-NA20 (B12/B71) antennas they're deploying also support midband (PCS/AWS).

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I caught them testing n41 from my site yesterday and was pulling speeds of about 260Mbps in my house but it looks like they turned it off shortly after I connected. No amount of trying to force my phone to n41 would work.

Right now, my home site is broadcasting n71 but not Band 71. I have a strong n71 signal but if I force Band 71, it connects to a distant to tower.

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n41 is back and even faster than before. Here's a speed test from inside my house.

Also 20MHz Band 41 is broadcasting from my site, speeds are ~40Mbps down and 4Mbps up.

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Edit: Getting even faster speeds this morning. Band 41 has also climbed up to around 70Mbps.

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Spotted two new B41/B71 upgrades over the past week. 

First site is at the corner of St Nick & W 123rd (eNB 138889):
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I believe the second site is at the corner of Fred Doug & W 132rd (eNB 41244), though I haven't yet confirmed. Prior to the upgrade, B71 signal was relatively weak around here - the closest site was ~6 blocks away. Here's hoping a full site modernization is the new norm!

Also discovered the site at the corner of St Nick & W 145th (eNB 104892) has been upgraded with B41, though B71 has been deployed here for quite a while.

I've been able to pull >100Mb/s on a single 20MHz B41 carrier (with a strong signal) on all these sites. I'm curious how T-Mobile is going to prioritize B41 in the future, and/or how long they are going to keep it around before refarming it to n41.

 

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Another site in my neighborhood that only had Band 2/66 got upgraded to add Band 12/71 and n71 sometime in the past few days. Speeds are around 220Mbps from it. I'm hoping that the workers come back and add n41 to it this week.

Also looks like T-Mobile pushed out a software update to the small cells in northern Crown Heights so that they're now broadcasting Band 66 in addition to Band 4. I don't know how that's supposed to help but at least they haven't forgotten about them lol.

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Quote

Also looks like T-Mobile pushed out a software update the small cells in northern Crown Heights so that they're now broadcasting Band 66 in addition to Band 4. I don't know how that's supposed to help but at least they haven't forgot about them lol. 

Are you referring to eNB 55177? Glad those things are finally getting some attention. I used to live around the corner from one of the nodes and they were all practically useless B4 SISO. I pulled ~30Mb/s off one at 2AM, but most of the time I couldn't pull >5Mb/s.

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1 hour ago, thisischuck01 said:

Are you referring to eNB 55177? Glad those things are finally getting some attention. I used to live around the corner from one of the nodes and they were all practically useless B4 SISO. I pulled ~30Mb/s off one at 2AM, but most of the time I couldn't pull >5Mb/s.

Yup! Those are them! They are pretty much useless. T-Mobile really needs to get it together and upgrade them. I feel sorry for the people that live nearby enough that they become the primary cell that they connect to.

During the day I can't break 10Mbps while connected to them. It's nearly always single digits speeds. 

Also forgot to add that I connected to 4 brand new Band 71 eNBs in Prospect Heights for the first time so it it seems that n71 upgrades are happening at the same pace as n41 upgrades in this part of Brooklyn. After doing the bare minimum for so long, T-Mobile is finally getting the message that every site needs every band. 

I'll try to confirm which sites they're on next weekend.

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I've been walking around northern Crown Heights/Prospect Heights with my phone locked to Band 41 and Band 71 in an effort to find new 600MHz and BRS/EBS sites.

So far I've gathered that T-Mobile is doing what they did back in their LTE deployments days and doing cluster deployments. By that I mean that they seem to be going to neighborhoods and upgrading pretty much all of the sites in that area at once. On September 1st you could count on one hand the number of sites with 600MHz in Crown Heights and Prospect Heights. Now it seems that somewhere in the range of 50-75% of the sites have 600MHz live. Additionally, about half of the sites that got 600MHz upgrades also got BRS/EBS upgrades and are broadcasting both n41 and Band 41. 

T-Mobile is moving extremely fast here!

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Initially T-Mobile was simply slapping n41 panels onto existing sites which meant that NR+LTE aggregation aggregated all available LTE bands with NR. Now, T-Mobile seems to be replacing 600/700MHz antennas every time they add n41 and as a result, the city is getting covered in split eNB IDs. On a local (legacy) 600MHz site by my home, when I connect to n71 it's n71 + Band 2 + Band 66 + Band 71 or Band 12 for a combined total of 50MHz of spectrum. However on my home site, because of the split eNB, when I force my phone to connect to n71 it only aggregates n71 + Band 2 + Band 66 for a total of 45MHz of spectrum.

It seems weird that T-Mobile is allowing this to happen instead of fixing it so that they can squeeze as much performance out of their network as possible. 5MHz of LTE is not much but it's still an extra ~37Mbps of speed and capacity that could be provided in NSA mode.

Interestingly this problem is not something I experience in LTE-only mode much anymore. My phone seems to have no issue aggregating LTE bands across the split most of the time.

 

Another thing that has been bothering me is that according to the FCC dashboard T-Mobile has 400MHz of spectrum in the 39GHz band here in NYC that they won in December of 2019 but they haven't done any upgrades to actually use that spectrum here. Instead they've been relying on the two 50MHz blocks aggregated together in the 28GHz band which performs worse than n41 on average.

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My main site at some point this week for T-Mobile got updated with an nr41 panel currently only broadcasting 20 MHz. I somehow missed it considering I haven't really been out this week at all been working on it. So I'm a little tight cuz I have a very much full window view of the building which is servicing me. From my current vantage point. I'm going to have to get on the street the building immediately adjacent to it, has a Sprint build and it looks like they removed a panel off of that one. But I'm going to have to get out the street level too confirm that.

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I am now connecting to 15 megahertz of T-Mobile band 41! In addition to the 20 MHz of NR 41. From what I can tell the Sprint site is still transmitting three carriers of two band 41, 20 wide channels and a 10 wide channel. For total 50 MHz there 

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