AT&T Gets LTE Network Tout in Small Town Paper

[KD8JBF]

I find it funny that AT&T being the LAST network to upgrade in the small town of Mansfield, OH to 4G LTE gets a nice write up in the paper, but no mention of Sprints being turned on in the area months ago...Also, I feel there's some misinformation about the Alltel merger... Something just smells fishy....mostly about the network upgrades for, "Alltel" which is a 3G only network...

 

http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/article/20140714/NEWS01/307140005/AT-T-Mansfield-network-upgraded?sf28502959=1

 

Thoughts?

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Fraydog]

I live in a similar area where Alltel was owned by Atlantic Tele-Network, that was sold to AT&T last year. AT&T has the equipment for LTE up on the tower AT&T just acquired in view of my house, but only HSPA+ here for now. There probably won't be LTE here until the Alltel switchover occurs. Mansfield, I suspect, is also part of this transition.

[jgore43]

I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happens in my home town. Everyone there has alltel and are very excited for the switch to att so there will probably be a newspaper article . Alltel CDMA service which used to be great is terrible now.

[KD8JBF]

I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happens in my home town. Everyone there has alltel and are very excited for the switch to att so there will probably be a newspaper article . Alltel CDMA service which used to be great is terrible now.

 

I will say that you're right on everyone being excited. A LOT of people had Alltel in Mansfield back in the day, but slowly transitioned over to Verizon as LTE became available. So this does make sense about people being excited for the change. I did notice someone else in the comments section on Facebook posted that 4G has been available for months...I'm wondering if he's referring to FauxG ie HSPA+ or LTE....hmmm...

[jgore43]

I will say that you're right on everyone being excited. A LOT of people had Alltel in Mansfield back in the day, but slowly transitioned over to Verizon as LTE became available. So this does make sense about people being excited for the change. I did notice someone else in the comments section on Facebook posted that 4G has been available for months...I'm wondering if he's referring to FauxG ie HSPA+ or LTE....hmmm...

The situation with cell service is unfortunate in my hometown. Most people jumped to Verizon when the merger happened but those who couldn't afford to stayed with alltel. The other 3 at the time were just limited to interstate coverage. There hasn't been any major maintenence on the network that I know of so it's gotten consistently worse as everyone got smartphones. In 2010 when I got my HTC desire I could get at least 1 mbps in my house. Now I don't even get alltel signal inside and when you do get it its very very slow. Anyway it will be nice to have 2 choices for phone service with speeds better than 3g.

 

The couple mailers my parents have recieved about the transition to att have specifically mentioned lte, from what I remember, being deployed to all the former alltel coverage area. So it really could be either.

[bgguy]

Here in Bowling Green, KY the paper had a similar article for AT&T but nothing for any other carriers. Definitely a biased article.

[WiWavelength]

Here in Bowling Green, KY the paper had a similar article for AT&T but nothing for any other carriers. Definitely a biased article.

 

I am not surprised.  Remember the AT&T-T-Mobile merger proceedings?  This is the AT&T public relations machine's way of doing business.  If AT&T had its way, the entire world would be covered in astroturf.

 

AJ