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Network Vision/LTE - East Iowa Market (Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Dubuque, Waterloo/Cedar Falls)


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And AJ corrected be there is enough spectrum in EBS G1-G3 for a 15 MHz channel in the Quad Cities with adequate guarding.

 

Even better.  Should be able to get a max throughput about 50-60Mbps out of that in ideal situations.  Useful.  Nothing to sneeze at.

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And AJ corrected be there is enough spectrum in EBS G1-G3 for a 15 MHz channel in the Quad Cities with adequate guarding.

 

...but only after total WiMAX shutdown.

 

AJ

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Correct there is currently a 10 or 15 MHz WiMax carrier deployed there.

 

As far as I know, WiMAX never standardized a 15 MHz TDD carrier.  Clearwire deployed only 5/10 MHz TDD carriers.

 

AJ

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As far as I know, WiMAX never standardized a 15 MHz TDD carrier.  Clearwire deployed only 5/10 MHz TDD carriers.

 

AJ

And that would make sense his capture was centered at 2683.5 right where you'd expect a 10 MHz carrier.

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With them only having protection sites, a full Wimax shutdown should be easy in this market.

As it would be in Omaha, but for whatever reason the protection sites here are still apparently active despite more than substantial protection coverage on the 8T8R deployment. It may also be part of the reason for our seemingly locally unique EARFCN in Omaha.

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As it would be in Omaha, but for whatever reason the protection sites here are still apparently active despite more than substantial protection coverage on the 8T8R deployment. It may also be part of the reason for our seemingly locally unique EARFCN in Omaha.

Yeah, but Omaha isn't spectrum limited, is it? There's little urgency for a complete shutdown.
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Yeah, but Omaha isn't spectrum limited, is it? There's little urgency for a complete shutdowns.

I think you're right about that. And I agree with your earlier point regarding a WiMAX shutdown. Honestly shouldn't be difficult, and despite this area not being a high priority, it seems like bringing on additional carriers alongside shutting down WiMAX is a nice stopgap at the very least to guarantee quality service in the near to middle term even without significant B41 spectrum holdings.

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  • 1 month later...

How is NV (especially 800MHz LTE) coming along in the Iowa City area? Supposedly Sprint's coverage map has Iowa City/Coralville/North Liberty as mostly LTE, and Sensorly and Open Signal have little data, but I only rarely get LTE in town. I am stuck on EVDO for about 80-90% of the time. I have seen one or two towers come online with LTE, but rarely am able to connect to it. Is it network-related or my iPhone's fault?

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How is NV (especially 800MHz LTE) coming along in the Iowa City area? Supposedly Sprint's coverage map has Iowa City/Coralville/North Liberty as mostly LTE, and Sensorly and Open Signal have little data, but I only rarely get LTE in town. I am stuck on EVDO for about 80-90% of the time. I have seen one or two towers come online with LTE, but rarely am able to connect to it. Is it network-related or my iPhone's fault?

 

Read up on the struggles of iPhone users with the latest Apple carrier bundles. 

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How is NV (especially 800MHz LTE) coming along in the Iowa City area? Supposedly Sprint's coverage map has Iowa City/Coralville/North Liberty as mostly LTE, and Sensorly and Open Signal have little data, but I only rarely get LTE in town. I am stuck on EVDO for about 80-90% of the time. I have seen one or two towers come online with LTE, but rarely am able to connect to it. Is it network-related or my iPhone's fault?

 

i don't ever get to iowa city so i have no first hand experience, but just looking at the maps on what towers are in the area and what upgrades they have you should be on LTE 80-90% of the time, not the other way around. so i would say you have a device issue.

 

there are 8 towers in and around iowa city that i would consider "iowa city towers". all but 2 of those 8 have both B25 and B26 active for LTE so you should see LTE more than not, unless you happen to mostly be in the area of the 2 non LTE towers.

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Before I posted this, I did extensive research into the iPhone scanner timer and carrier bundles. My closest Apple store is in Des Moines, but I will be in KC and OK City soon, So I could visit one there, but what could they do or try to do if I go?

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assuming it is the apple carrier bundle as lilotimz posted, i don't think there is much you can do besides get a phone that isn't an iphone or wait until they eventually fix it, assuming they even do. i don't stay up on iphones much so i'm not sure on all of the details of the issue with it. i just know the carrier bundle is the modem firmware/software so would be in control of connections to the network.

 

my wife has an iphone 6 and in the des moines area she doesn't have any issues, or i should say she hasn't complained to me about having issues ;)

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as far as iowa goes, any tower that has B25 LTE 99% most likely has B26 as well. there might be a few out there that haven't gotten fired up for some reason, but not many. des moines and ames are starting to get some B41 installed but i wouldn't call it a "roll out" they are putting it on sites on a case by case basis. there are still a lot of 3G only towers out there, especially east iowa market. that will most likely stay that way until they get caught up in major markets and find the time/money to come back and start converting them to add B25/B26.

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I hope the LTE coverage gets better and the EVDO gets faster. I know it will probably be a long time before the IC area gets B41 because there is an internet company that owns most to all 2.5GHz spectrum ????

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi all, I'm considering switching my phone to Sprint to take advantage of the DirecTV promotion and was wondering if anyone can provide any rough idea of Sprint's current service in the Quad Cities.  From what I remember about Sprint in 2011-2012 before Network Vision, their network was unusable from a data standpoint on quite a few towers around the Quad Cities.  I would hope this has changed by now.  I don't care about super fast 4G speeds, I would be quite satisfied with reliable calls and data speeds at 500k-1Mb.   Any input would be awesome.  Thanks!

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Reliable and the quad cities don't mix. There are places where sprint is fantastic. John Deere road by the mall. West of Camden park in Milan and Colona work great. Downtown Moline will not have data services, Milan is pretty brutal and the davenport/Bettendorf speeds are around .16-.24.

 

I ended up switching to for the time being because data was not reliable at all. It was great until February and then went downhill fast. Multiple tickets and calls to Sprint and no one could say what is wrong. They say that they haven't seen a ticket priority set as high as the ones in the QC market, but they claim they can't find a problem.

 

My daughter's framily line is still active (as voice and text work great). I am hoping they get their act together in this area in the near future as I would love to come back as I am rooting for them and have had service with them for 20 years. Also, I have been to other markets like Chicago and Cincinnati where sprint seemed better than the other 2. So, I know what they are capable of; they just need to get it working here. However, what I have heard is that they really don't have the spectrum here to deploy Spark. Wondering what can be done here or if this area will always be a problem.

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Thanks for the input bkco14, I really appreciate it.  I also found the following thread on Sprint's messageboard that mentions the same thing you're finding, slow data on various towers.   Interestingly it seems to indicate that at least one tower has 4G in the 2.5ghz frequency range (for almost a year now).  

 

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DAnNgH4xnDcJ:https://community.sprint.com/baw/message/992589+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

 

Though I think I could probably put up with 0.16-0.24mbps if it's at least reliable and doesn't quit working entirely.  I had a Sprint phone and it was unacceptable back in 2011-2012 when often I couldn't even sync my email or bring up a website at all because the data was so unusable. 

 

But that is very disheartening to hear that even with the Network Vision overhaul that data still performs poorly :(  In Bettendorf on the tower at 21st St, Sprint installed 6 antennas (2 per sector) instead of the typical 3 antennas back when they replaced everything, so if data is still slow in Bettendorf I'm not sure what else Sprint can do in that area. And looking at Sensorly's speedtest data it shows slow data all around that tower.  I believe Sprint is working on going back to some of those 3 antenna towers in the Quad Cities and adding another 3 antennas on them as well.  I assume this is what's needed to add another LTE/EVDO carrier that was mentioned in previous messages in this thread?  Or are the additional 3 antennas for 2.5ghz use?  

 

I'm torn on this, it's tempting to switch back for mostly free service for a year, but it sounds like it's one of those things where I will get what I pay for.

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Since I still have tickets open with sprint, I called today to see how they were coming along and was transferred to their Oklahoma office. I was told that in this area, the best thing to do would be to turn off LTE on my phone and just use 3G.

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Since I still have tickets open with sprint, I called today to see how they were coming along and was transferred to their Oklahoma office. I was told that in this area, the best thing to do would be to turn off LTE on my phone and just use 3G.

at least they know they are having issues.... how is your 3g network around there?

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Normally I'd probably take down a complaint, but I want to state how much this market sucks for all carriers. No B41 for Sprint? iWireless? Talk about a duopoly market, that place might rank lower than Omaha if RootMetrics measured there.

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Yeah. I don't understand why this market is so terrible with multiple carriers even with a population of 500,000 people.

 

Also, I was just floored at the response was "looks like the area isn't good, so turn off LTE". They even said there wasn't anything in the pipeline to do anything here to fix the problems.

 

I can't wait to move :-).

Edited by bkco14
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