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Network Vision/LTE - Raleigh/Durham Market (includes Fayetteville)


spotmeterf64

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I have seen LTE in some new places, particularly the Cary dead zone. although it is still just band 26. However, in East Raleigh I got something down-right weird. Signal Checker showed band 41^2 (41 with a power of 2 above it). Is this carrier aggregation here in Raleigh? I didn't think my phone supported it at all, and I might be right, because when band 41^2 is showing rather than just band 41 without the superscript I have no data connection. 

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I have seen LTE in some new places, particularly the Cary dead zone. although it is still just band 26. However, in East Raleigh I got something down-right weird. Signal Checker showed band 41^2 (41 with a power of 2 above it). Is this carrier aggregation here in Raleigh? I didn't think my phone supported it at all, and I might be right, because when band 41^2 is showing rather than just band 41 without the superscript I have no data connection. 

What you saw was indeed a second Band 41 carrier. Every device that supports Band 41 will see both carriers. Essentially doubling capacity and bringing speeds up for everyone despite not supporting carrier aggregation. Having a CA enabled device would not only have access to that second carrier, but also aggregate it for double the peak speed.

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I've noticed greater data speeds and better coverage on the Saunders corridor south of Raleigh heading into Garner lately, probably since Christmas. Before my phone would hop down to 3G or my streaming music would pause while waiting on the I-40 off-ramp turning onto Saunders.

 

That's the only real improvement I've noticed recently in the area. I said a few months ago that coverage now is 100% adequate for my needs - and it remains as such.

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I live in Person County (North of Durham), I used to get decent LTE on the road I live on,  but looking at the maps it seems to me that they are in the process of removing the LTE from around me? Could they be upgrading or just packing up and leaving lol?

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So is what we see here in RDU the best it's going to get? I'm not complaining -- I activated a VZW phone over the weekend and have better coverage with S than I do with VZW in the areas I live work and play -- but I hope I'm not being greedy by looking for more. What's upcoming in Sprint's improvements in the RDU area?

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So is what we see here in RDU the best it's going to get? I'm not complaining -- I activated a VZW phone over the weekend and have better coverage with S than I do with VZW in the areas I live work and play -- but I hope I'm not being greedy by looking for more. What's upcoming in Sprint's improvements in the RDU area?

Please, Sir. I want some more.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZrgxHvNNUc
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Any news for the Triangle market?

 

I switched from T-Mobile a few days ago as I kept having issues with coverage in some of the buildings I am in frequently and the modem on the iPhone XS kept locking up when transitioning from low coverage to high coverage areas.

Sprint has better coverage indoors in the places I go to but the upload speeds are an issue. While it's nice to get 70 - 90 MB/s DL, video chat just doesn't work well with 2 MB/s UL.  Latency is pretty good too. Just that upstream... Always something :)

 

Also, does WiFi calling on Sprint use a different audio codec that is more compressed than the one T-Mobile uses?

I understand my area still uses 1x for voice at this time but I would have thought WiFi calling uses a better codec since bandwidth doesn't matter. T-Mobile was much clearer on WiFi calling.

Edited by Paulebar
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  • 2 weeks later...
On 2/11/2019 at 6:11 PM, Paulebar said:

Any news for the Triangle market?

 

I switched from T-Mobile a few days ago as I kept having issues with coverage in some of the buildings I am in frequently and the modem on the iPhone XS kept locking up when transitioning from low coverage to high coverage areas.

Sprint has better coverage indoors in the places I go to but the upload speeds are an issue. While it's nice to get 70 - 90 MB/s DL, video chat just doesn't work well with 2 MB/s UL.  Latency is pretty good too. Just that upstream... Always something :)

 

Also, does WiFi calling on Sprint use a different audio codec that is more compressed than the one T-Mobile uses?

I understand my area still uses 1x for voice at this time but I would have thought WiFi calling uses a better codec since bandwidth doesn't matter. T-Mobile was much clearer on WiFi calling.

I will drive down to Fayetteville for next week.

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I was in Greenville, NC last week and finally go to experience T-Mobile's network somewhere that wasn't New York for an extended period of time. Just like NYC, T-Mobile's 600MHz spectrum is extremely underdeployed. There are about 15 T-Mobile sites in the entire city and T-Mobile has deployed 600MHz on only 1 of them. Sprint on the other hand has tri-banded nearly every site. Another issue is that Greenville has pretty bad site density on all networks but the issue is exacerbated on T-Mobile by the fact that they lack Band 12 licenses for pretty much all of Eastern NC. The only lowband license they have is 600MHz and they haven't really put it to use at all.

The good news is that speeds weren't that bad at all. Speeds were around 20Mbps on average with peaks of about 65Mbps. Deploying 600MHz likely isn't a priority for T-Mobile in Greenville and the towns surrounding it because on their end the network performance looks fine however, deploying 600MHz would fill in a lot of coverage gaps and give a much more reliable signal overall.

Until then, Verizon and AT&T will have T-Mobile beat on coverage thanks to them having lowband on every site and U.S. Cellular will have them beat because U.S. Cellular has a bunch of extra sites that no other carrier uses in the region that provide them with much better coverage than any other carrier in the area.

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I was just taking look at the permits for Greenville, NC and noticed that T-Mobile has a ton of approved permits for antenna upgrades to virtually all of their sites in the city.

Almost all of T-Mobile's permits call for upgrading the existing backhaul on all of the sites that they're upgrading from coax to HFC. Sadly there are no diagrams to see what antennas are being put up but most of the permits reference replacing and adding RRUs, replacing existing antennas, and adding new antennas which is good news. 

 

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Looks like T-Mobile is still expanding in rural Eastern NC. I just found another new site in Ayden, NC. According to Cellmapper it was first mapped in March of this year. It looks like it fills in a spot where T-Mobile's coverage was really weak along North Carolina Highway 11 and is technically T-Mobile's second site in the town. So it seems that T-Mobile's talk about pushing into rural America also means building new sites to better serve some of those areas.

There's no Band/n41 on the site but they did put Band 2/66/71 on it which is much better than what they did when they first expanded out there. During T-Mobile's first rural push they mostly just put Band 2 on the sites and didn't bother putting AWS at all and then years later put Band 71 on very few sites. Glad to see their new philosophy of "every band on every site" is holding true.

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Looked through the Greenville permitting system again and I'm still finding tons of new T-Mobile upgrade permits since June. Sites that have been sitting with only Band 2/66 are getting backhaul and antenna upgrades to support Band 2/66/41/71 and n41/71. I also spotted a few permits for adding backup generators to sites which should be helpful in the event of power outages  

I even found a permit for a new site in Greenville that's not a Sprint collocation so it seems that T-Mobile is increasing density where necessary and not just upgrading existing towers. Pretty excited to test the network the next time I go down!

b3UY5Gs.png

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