Jump to content

Recommended Posts

Posted (edited)

So, tonight as of 6:30 p.m. it will be approximately one week since they turned on LTE operations in certain areas of the Twin Cities. My question is: will more sites turn on tonight?

 

Is it going to be a "several sites per week" operation or is it "they're ready when they're ready?"

 

I'm curious but the sensorly maps for this area shows a pretty good picture of the coverage for this area now:

 

http://www.sensorly....St.%20Paul%20MN

Edited by aliensporebomb
Posted

So, tonight as of 6:30 p.m. it will be approximately one week with LTE operations in certain areas of the Twin Cities. My question is: will more sites turn on? Is it going to be a "several sites per week" operation or is it "they're ready when they're ready?" I'm curious but the sensorly maps for this area shows a pretty good picture of the coverage for this area now.

 

http://www.sensorly....St.%20Paul%20MN

 

There will be more sites coming online every week. How many depends on how aggressive Samsung is going to be in this market. They were really aggressive in the Chicago market, but they were battling handoff issues between new equipment and legacy towers, so they had to go fast to avoid a poor end user experience. Weather could play a big part in the Minnesota market, and could push the techs off the "towers" and onto rooftop sites. We will have to wait and see, but I would think that a good portion of the backhaul has already been installed as once the frost sets in, it gets a whole lot more expensive to lay cable... If the backhaul is in, and Samsung has ample equipment, the contractors should be able to aggressively upgrade the market.

 

Also, if you are interested in becoming a sponsor, there is a weekly update of all the accepted sites and maps showing where they are. How to become a Sponsor

Posted (edited)

Thanks for the tip on sponsoring. I'll look into it.

 

So far it's been unseasonably mild in Minnesota of late - it was literally 50 degrees fahrenheit the day before yesterday (I put the Christmas lights on the house in a t-shirt and jeans and no jacket!) and almost strangely warmer than usual although in the last 24 hours the temps have been dropping to in the 30s and 40s so it could be properly heading into winter - I heard someone talking about snow falling tomorrow too. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

 

Bad enough the poor installer guys have to climb hundreds of feet into the air but it's cold up there too? They definetely work hard for the $.

Edited by aliensporebomb
Posted (edited)

I just got a 4g signal on my S3 about 10 min ago from downtown St Paul. I couldn't get sensorly to post. Kept on getting Error 405 (other 0 This endpoint only supports GET)" .

 

i did a speed test and got 10 down and 1.5 up. excited!

Edited by batboy
Posted

Pretty close to the tower and depending on where I am in the house, I loose signal. I can get around 6 meg down on my EVO lte, but my dad's galaxy nexus gets 10+ down.

Posted (edited)

Maybe more will show as the day goes on. I've seen no changes in sensorly over the last few days. I suppose it's possible if there's a tower in Linwood Township we might have users who don't even know about Sensorly or other towers in outstate Minnesota etc.

Edited by aliensporebomb
Posted

Maybe more will show as the day goes on. I've seen no changes in sensorly over the last few days. I suppose it's possible if there's a tower in Linwood Township we might have users who don't even know about Sensorly or other towers in outstate Minnesota etc.

 

I'm going to map a little bit when I get off of work.

Posted
I noticed a blip in downtown St. Paul. Can anyone confirm that? If so' date=' that's good news. It's not downtown Minneapolis, but it's progress![/quote']

 

That's confirmed. It now shows on Sensorly maps. Also one small blip at the airport. You have to zoom in close to see them but they are there.

Posted (edited)

Looks like that blip is right near the Landmark Center and another over closer to the river - near Kellogg Boulevard & Shepard Road. Very interesting indeed.

 

The Linwood Township signal is interesting - it appears to curve around Martin Lake directly to the east of St. Francis. Strongest signals are right near the Linwood Fire Department and Township Building and Lutheran Church.

 

So far nothing new (meaning yesterday's power-up of towers) south of 494 this go round that I can see.

 

I don't see any blips near Plymouth but it could just as well be a bleedover from the Corcoran signal as it's showing farther south on the map than it did last week - be interesting to have someone head south on County Road 101 and checking as far as south as Hamel. I bet there is some signal there.

Edited by aliensporebomb
Posted

You just looked at all the stuff that I added in linwood. At the firestation I can get around 15 meg on my evo. At home its around 8 today. Gonna map out some more soon.

 

If you flip over to 2g/3g, youll see on the other side of martin lake it goes down to 3g. Also if you continue west on 22 right to where the 4g dies, i swung a right(north) onto fontana then a right onto 223rd. Lots and lots of trees in that area so back down to 3g. Even that far out on 22 when I did a speed test I was getting around 6 meg down.

Posted

Confirmed on the blips by the airport on the PC version - right off Highway 55 and Federal Drive right next to the Fort Snelling memorial chapel foundation. I need to go near there after work today anyway so I'll check it out.

 

I don't know about the Android version of Sensorly but on the iPhone version airports show up purple. It's maddening since the blips for 4G are purple on that version so it blends together.

Posted

I try to use the "report" on sensorly and just get "Error 405 (other - This endpoint only supports GET.)" - Is it still reporting data at least?

Posted

I try to use the "report" on sensorly and just get "Error 405 (other - This endpoint only supports GET.)" - Is it still reporting data at least?

 

Try the "map trip" function (make sure to hit start). That sure provide the data for the maps we are looking at. If it's only giving you an error on 4G, there may be an issue with data with the site still being in testing or something.

Posted

I try to use the "report" on sensorly and just get "Error 405 (other - This endpoint only supports GET.)" - Is it still reporting data at least?

I had a bunch of errors , somehow it did actually update even though I never witnessed it update.

 

St.paul area has been pure crap for me with 4G for the last couple months, i believe the tower I was connecting with was near 35 and randolph, up sometimes and gone all together at other times with data at times in the 100-200k range terrible I'd actually just run 3G most of the time.

Posted

A friend of mine and I ate dinner tonight at the Culvers at 7801 Nicollet Avenue in Bloomington tonight and his Galaxy SIII read 4G (not sure if it does that all of the time but it sure seemed like his phone was responding quicker than usual).

 

My own iPhone5 did not pick up LTE although it may be a stretch at that distance from one little tower.

 

He's not into LTE geekery and doesn't have any speedtest or sensorly apps on his phone otherwise I'd have done some testing. Shrug.

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.


  • large.unreadcontent.png.6ef00db54e758d06

  • gallery_1_23_9202.png

  • Posts

    • 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.
    • It seems like that is the smallest Google Play System change that google releases. I see 12 MB updates really regularly. 
    • 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.  
    • Just checked and found a 12MB Google Play System update ready to download.    Still October 1 for the date after however. 
    • 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  
  • Recently Browsing

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...