Network Vision/LTE - Western & Central Pennsylvania Markets (Lancaster, Scranton, Erie, State College, Williamsport)
By
jeremyandrew
in Markets
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By Paynefanbro · Posted
Vinegar Hill is getting the Brooklyn Heights treatment now with regard to small cells. I mapped two more small cells in the neighborhood in the past few days so now T-Mobile is up to 8 of them in such a tiny neighborhood. While it's cool they're doing this since it means outdoors you get a consistent 400Mbps+ almost everywhere, it sucks because they're obviously deploying so many of them to make up for their lack of a macro site in the entire neighborhood. Because there isn't a macro, the small cells have a greater coverage area than you see in other neighborhoods and you often connect to them while indoors but coverage and speeds fall off indoors much faster on small cells than on macros in my experience. Even Dish has better coverage than T-Mobile in Vinegar Hill since they added the site on top of the Extra Space Storage building alongside AT&T and Verizon. T-Mobile needs to get in line with their competitors there. -
By PedroDaGr8 · Posted
It seems like that is the smallest Google Play System change that google releases. I see 12 MB updates really regularly. -
By Paynefanbro · Posted
Went back to Greenville last week and what an insane change 4 years has made! Every site in the city has n25/41/71 now and T-Mobile has even added new sites in the city since the last time I was there. As a result, their coverage and speeds are great everywhere. Unfortunately I don't have my Verizon line anymore so I'm unable to compare their performance to T-Mobile but they definitely had better coverage and speeds than AT&Tin my testing. On the LTE side of things, T-Mobile has 5MHz Band 71, 10MHz Band 66, and 5MHz Band 2 deployed. On the 5G side, they have 190MHz n41, 15MHz n25, and 15MHz n71 deployed. As you'd expect 5G is several times faster than LTE here because of that. One thing I noticed though is that T-Mobile's speeds pretty much never go above 1Gbps here. I'm not sure if it's a backhaul limitation or if they're seriously pushing their 5G home internet product here but on most sites I was seeing 500-600Mbps with some sites having peaks in the high 800s-low 900's. I also noticed that upload speeds weren't nearly as good as they were in NYC. I attribute this to the fact that site spacing often cause the phone to drop to n25 or n71 for uploads as opposed to using n41. I have a handful of high (>100Mbps) upload speed tests but that was with me virtually right next to a site. Since I drove my own car instead of riding with family, I used the opportunity to map a ton of rural roads outside to Greenville to see what kind of coverage I'd get. T-Mobile has stepped up their game a ton in this regard as I found that coverage matched and in many cases surpassed what I was seeing on AT&T. areas where AT&T dropped to 1 bar or even no signal, I held onto weak n71 and was still able to place calls using VoNR. There are still areas where I would drop signal but those were areas where I'm certain the only carrier available was U.S. Cellular since they still have a ton of macros that they're the only tenant on. The U.S. Cellular merger won't add much to T-Mobile's spectrum coffers there; they'll increase 600MHz from 20MHz to 30MHz, gain another 10MHz of AWS, and acquire the rest of the 24GHz band, but they'll gain a ton new sites to bolster their rural coverage in this area and make it pretty much the best in the region. — — — — — I also mapped Dish while down there. Dish's doesn't have much spectrum in Pitt County, they only have 5MHz n71, 25MHz n70 and 5MHz n29. This lack of spectrum combined with what is pretty much a skeleton/license protection network meant that in most cases I was only on 1-2 bars of n71 indoors and while outdoors I wasn't seeing speeds nearly as good as I get in NYC. While directly in front of a site I could get over 300Mbps but in most cases while out and about I wasn't seeing over 100Mbps. In fact, at my hotel I was only able to get about 5Mbps down and 2Mbps up on n71. Maybe as they densify I'll see more consistently high speeds but their lack of spectrum will remain a huge bottleneck much like it was for T-Mobile pre-Sprint merger. — — — — — AT&T and Verizon are the only carriers with small cells in Greenville. Verizon has a significantly larger deployment than AT&T though, with AT&T having it along some roads where they have weaker coverage while Verizon seems to be using them for added capacity Uptown and especially around ECU. They started being installed around 2019 but none of them have 5G as far as I can tell, only LTE. AT&T also has C-band and DoD deployed on every site in the city, giving me speeds in the range of 350-400Mbps in most areas. — — — — — Here are some photos of small cells in Greenville. -
By PythonFanPA · Posted
Just checked and found a 12MB Google Play System update ready to download. Still October 1 for the date after however. -
By jonathanm1978 · Posted
Looks like my little area finally has some decent mobile connectivity. Still have a few dead spots on both tmo and firstnet... https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/10549791800
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