Network Vision/LTE - Central and South Jersey Markets

[Paynefanbro]

Beautiful day yesterday so I went to Six Flags again. Soon we're gonna have to call this the Six Flags thread lol.

I finally got a pic of the site that serves the entire park. It was super sunny so the picture was pretty backlit but I managed to edit it a bit to bring out some the detail.

Sprint used to be at the very top of the monopole but their entire rack is gone now. T-Mobile was just below them so they didn't bother moving up since they still now have highest position on the site with Sprint gone.

T-Mobile has an Ericsson 6449 deployed for n41, an RFS antenna for Band 2/12/66/71 and n25/71, and on one sector they have a a Band 2/66 high capacity antenna that actually has it's own eNB.

Verizon has a Samsung massive MIMO C-band antenna, CBRS, and their usual Band 2/5/13/66 antennas. They also have a MatSing Ball antenna on the sector that faces Great Adventure.

AT&T has their standard setup on 2 out of 3 sectors and on the third sector that faces Great Adventure they have 3 gigantic high capacity antennas. They have n5 deployed but no n77.

Dish is a recent addition to the site, lowest on the monopole, just under AT&T. No high capacity setup on this site, just their normal single antenna per sector setup. To be fair they likely won't have the same amount of traffic as the big three so this is more than enough capacity for now. 

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Just like last year T-Mobile was still the fastest carrier in my testing followed by Verizon and then AT&T. None of the carriers were slow, just different levels of fast. I was getting upwards of 400Mbps on T-Mobile, 150Mbps on Verizon, and AT&T was ~50Mbps park wide. 

[Paynefanbro]

Mapped a bit of Perth Amboy since it seemed undermapped on Cellmapper. There are no Sprint conversions in the city however I did map a new build and one older site that had never been mapped before.

The part that stood out to me while mapping the city is T-Mobile's site density in comparison to AT&T specifically since those are the two networks that I map. T-Mobile has 10 sites within city limits in comparison to AT&T's 4 sites. AT&T still performs great there thanks to their combo of C-band and DoD spectrum. I got max speeds of about 650Mbps right under a site but those speeds quickly drop off the farther you go from the site. In some parts of the city I couldn't get any more than ~40Mbps on AT&T because I was at the edge of the C-band cell and I'm certain most of the throughput was coming from the lowband I was aggregating with.

T-Mobile on the other hand couldn't get the peak speeds that AT&T had because of NextWave encumbering them. They only have 40+40 n41 but had much more consistent 300-400Mbps speeds virtually everywhere I went and a much stronger signal. The only area where they struggled in terms of speed was around Five Corners where T-Mobile has a site on top of the Perth Amboy National Bank Building but it hasn't been upgraded just yet. They only have n71 and n25 on that site. I got speeds of about 150-200Mbps under that site which isn't bad but it's also the busiest area of the city so they definitely could use the capacity.

[Paynefanbro]

Went to Hurricane Harbor again this past weekend, this time testing Verizon and T-Mobile. In my testing, Verizon is now the fastest carrier, at least on the Hurricane Harbor sector. Despite it being pretty overcast on Saturday with temperatures in the mid-80's the park was at full capacity. 

Verizon had 160MHz of n77 and T-Mobile now has 160MHz of n41. On LTE I was seeing speeds in the range of 50-100Mbps while T-Mobile's LTE on was completely swamped, barely crossing 3Mbps. While both carriers only have a single high capacity sector (facing Great Adventure, Verizon benefits from having CBRS deployed on all sectors. This is an extra 60-100MHz of capacity that T-Mobile doesn't have. Maybe when T-Mobile gets around to deploying their C-band we'll see a boost in speeds again to be more competitive with Verizon. On the 5G side of things, T-Mobile's speeds were just over half that of Verizon. 

That said, neither carrier was slow and I had zero issue using Xbox Cloud Gaming on T-Mobile despite their weaker upload speeds and higher ping.