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Network Vision/LTE - Shentel Market (Shenandoah Valley/Hagerstown/Harrisburg)


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Load balancing algorithms automatically shuffle connections between lte carriers so that performance on both are within a few perctange delta.

 

You personally not seeing it doesn't mean others aren't on it.

I have two phones that are tri-band (work and personal) and I haven't seen the second pcs carrier on either since B26 went live. This is just on the tower closest to my home. I've picked it up elsewhere.

 

Sent from my Note 4.

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Well I was on my way to the shady maple buffet in Ephrata PA, and look what I found again, I swear sprint picks the weirdest places to put b41,this is literally out in Amish country, I will say though, speeds are amazing out here, probably because of that exact reason, lol

vTnh8t0l.png

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Well I was on my way to the shady maple buffet in Ephrata PA, and look what I found again, I swear sprint picks the weirdest places to put b41,this is literally out in Amish country, I will say though, speeds are amazing out here, probably because of that exact reason, lol

 

http://imgur.com/vTnh8t0

EVERYBODY needs to visit Shady Maple at least once in their life.  If your do, you will be interested in something else other than B-41.

http://www.shady-maple.com/smorgasbord/

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EVERYBODY needs to visit Shady Maple at least once in their life.  If your do, you will be interested in something else other than B-41.

http://www.shady-maple.com/smorgasbord/

 

My mom loves that place! I've heard nothing but rave reviews but I've never been. I'm gonna have to go see what all the fuss is about

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I don't think I posted it here yet, but I found another small cell located across the street from Central High School in Woodstock, VA. It's about 100 yards northeast of the intersection of Susan Ave and Falcon Dr. It appears it's only broadcasting B25. I can't seem to get CDMA on it but I'll have to go back again sometime to check it again. I only had a couple minutes the last time I was there. I'll try to get it with coordinates when I go back so it can be added to the map. 

 

This is the second setup I found near a school. The other is actually on top of Stonewall Jackson HS (near Mt Jackson, VA). That one has been on the map for a while and it's CDMA only, as far as I can tell. I'm wondering if Shentel may keep adding more of these near schools, since schools are infamous for horrible service thanks to a lot of brick, block, and concrete. 

 

Has anyone else found any of these yet?

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I don't think I posted it here yet, but I found another small cell located across the street from Central High School in Woodstock, VA. It's about 100 yards northeast of the intersection of Susan Ave and Falcon Dr. It appears it's only broadcasting B25. I can't seem to get CDMA on it but I'll have to go back again sometime to check it again. I only had a couple minutes the last time I was there. I'll try to get it with coordinates when I go back so it can be added to the map.

 

This is the second setup I found near a school. The other is actually on top of Stonewall Jackson HS (near Mt Jackson, VA). That one has been on the map for a while and it's CDMA only, as far as I can tell. I'm wondering if Shentel may keep adding more of these near schools, since schools are infamous for horrible service thanks to a lot of brick, block, and concrete.

 

Has anyone else found any of these yet?

You can't just say you found one without taking a picture.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5

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You can't just say you found one without taking a picture.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5

I should've taken a pic but someone was with me in the car and I didn't want to seem too completely weird. I'll try to get one soon and post it.

 

Edit: By the way, look at my profile pic. That is of a small omni-directional CDMA antenna I found in Toms Brook, VA. They have since added small cell B25 antennas (one facing north and one facing south down Route 11). I haven't gotten a new pic of that either, but the B25 antennas are the same as the one I just found in Woodstock at CHS. They are very small antennas mounted to a telephone pole in both instances.

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I should've taken a pic but someone was with me in the car and I didn't want to seem too completely weird. I'll try to get one soon and post it.

Nothing weird about it. I used to have the same reservations, now my friends are taking the pictures for me.

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Finally got a pic of the small cell I referenced above in Woodstock, VA. It appears it is B25 only. I could not pick up 1x or EVDO from it at all.

 

Sent from my Note 4.

 

Yep. Alcatel-Lucent MetroCell B25s. Take more pictures if you can and put it in the.. appropriate thread. :)

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f28b945076eb9a4734c78eafe943e123.jpg

 

This is a pic of the other small cell in Toms Brook, VA. In addition to the B25 only panels, this one has an omni-directional CDMA antenna broadcasting 1x and EVDO.

 

Sent from my Note 4.

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This is a pic of the other small cell in Toms Brook, VA. In addition to the B25 only panels, this one has an omni-directional CDMA antenna broadcasting 1x and EVDO.

 

Sent from my Note 4.

 

More pictures! More more more! :D Need some for this thread!

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  • 3 weeks later...

http://www.nvdaily.com/news/2014/06/county-oks-new-shentel-tower.php

 

Shentel is replacing the tower at 1503 Cottontown Road. The old one couldn't hold any more equipment. [/size]

This tower has finally been replaced with the monopole. I snapped a pic today. I'll try to load it if I have a chance later. It had to have been done it the past couple weeks. The old pole is still standing.

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uploadfromtaptalk1427154670642.jpg

 

New monopole is on the left. The old self-supporting lattice is on the right. It appears Shentel added new panels on the new tower but didn't take off the old ones on the old tower. In signal check, I was still "seeing" the old tower as a neighbor cell, even though my phone would not actually switch to it. It may have just been made inactive but still on, if that makes sense.

 

A few things of note. I think the new tower is operating in low power mode as I couldn't get a signal better than -95 rsrp with a clear view of the tower. Also, the old tower never broadcasted B26. I did pick up a B26 signal in this area but the GCI didn't match the B25 signal of the new tower. I'm wondering if they forgot to match them or if that will be done when they return. Maybe someone with more knowledge could chime in here.

 

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm fairly certain the B26 signal I was picking up was coming from the new tower because I have all the other towers around here in Signal Check and no notes popped up while on B26.

 

Since the newspaper (NV Daily) decided to delete that article, this tower is West of Strasburg, VA in an area called Lebanon Church along Rt 55.

 

Sent from my Note 4.

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  • 1 month later...

Excerpts from the earnings call on 5/4 that may be of interest (this is from the transcript of the conference call so the computer that converts the audio to text is off here and there, but you can figure out what they were saying for the most part):

 

We have 542 sites, 95% of the sites have 800 megahertz LTE service, 126 sites have a second 1,900 megahertz LTE carrier. We’ve been able to harvest 10 megahertz of our original 30 for LTE and will continue to deploy the second 1,900 LTE carrier as need growth. 84% of all of our data traffic is on LTE, with 35% of the LTE traffic on 800 megahertz. Average speeds are approximately 5 megahertz.

Data usage grew by 15% in the first quarter, with LTE up 19% and EVDO down approximately 5%. The average customer use approximately 3.8 gigabytes per month in the first quarter.

We have 800 megahertz voice service on 95% of our cell sites approximately 28% of the voice traffic is on 800. Voice usage decreased slightly in the first quarter. Drop calls were at 0.6% and blocked calls at 0.4%. We have our fiber built to 194 cell sites, 152 Shentel’s sites and 42 for others, with 22 additional sites under construction and 11 in engineering.

the deployment of 2.5 is going to be relatively simple, I never want to say simple, because nothing ever it is, but we will be just adding a 2.5 carrier card into the base station and the base stations are all set up to able to take that card and we will have to put an additional set of antennas on the tower, because the antennas that we put on the tower were a combination 800, 1900 antenna, so we already have been working through and then working for well over a year with the tower sites that we has designated as being high traffic and have most of the agreements done at this point, we’ve all the work for the, once we’re going to deploy this year and a lot of the work done for, once we’re going to deploy next year, so the amount of work will be relatively small, obviously, we will require climbing the tower, but not nearly the effort that was done for network addition

 

In reference to small cell deployment:

We actually have done, kind of taken two different approaches, one, we think the best use of small scale it was actually in building, and we’ve deployed them in a number of buildings and malls and we getting very good results from that. We did do one exterior, our outside deployment in Hagerstown and just because of the density of our markets we didn’t really get the bank of the box on that deployment. And so at this point, our plan is to use the small sales in building and in areas like stadiums or that sort of thing that there would be a lot of focus in a very small geographic area, but because of our density the outside ones on pulls really has not given us the results that we had hoped. It makes sense.

 

In reference to B41 deployment:

No, we’ve always said that we would be launching a 50 to 75 sites this year. It was just always going to be at the end of this year. We really - even though we’ve continue to have very, very high utilization - at this point, we have had enough capacity to be able to carry it, but we’re looking forward to using as a laser not as a Broadway to identify sites that do have lot high usage and that’s what primarily in our Hagerstown, [indiscernible] Harrisburg, Harrisonburg, Winchester markets is where we’re going to be deploying those types.

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That 0.6% drop rate is going to be going up quickly. Every time I handoff to another site my calls drop. I first noticed it Friday but figured it was because of Apple Blossom. That was until today when driving back from Harrisonburg on I81 the longest I could keep a call active was about a minute.

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That 0.6% drop rate is going to be going up quickly. Every time I handoff to another site my calls drop. I first noticed it Friday but figured it was because of Apple Blossom. That was until today when driving back from Harrisonburg on I81 the longest I could keep a call active was about a minute.

Not sure if you have an S6, but that is a problem with that phone. I haven't heard of that issue with any others. My wife has an S6 and has had some issues with dropped calls.

 

Sent from my Note 4.

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Excerpts from the earnings call on 5/4...

Mostly good news in there. Thanks for the post. Hopefully they clean up that transcript later. It was hard to read in places. (pulls instead of poles, etc)

 

Sent from my Note 4.

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Not sure if you have an S6, but that is a problem with that phone. I haven't heard of that issue with any others. My wife has an S6 and has had some issues with dropped calls.

 

Sent from my Note 4.

I have a M9. Like I said up until Friday morning I never had an issue with handoff.
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I have noticed something lately now that the towers are load balancing. The closest tower to my house had two PCS carriers live prior to B26 being lit up. Since B26 came online, I never see the second carrier anymore from that tower. I'm curious as to why I never see it anymore.

Looks like the second carrier (B25) is back again at the tower closest to my house. It disappeared when they added B26. It's now back online and is very noticeable. Speeds were around 3-5mbps during peak hours. I just did a test and had around 9. I mostly use wifi at home but I do use this same tower when I'm out of the house quite often.

 

Sent from my Note 4.

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I should've taken a pic but someone was with me in the car and I didn't want to seem too completely weird. I'll try to get one soon and post it.

 

Edit: By the way, look at my profile pic. That is of a small omni-directional CDMA antenna I found in Toms Brook, VA. They have since added small cell B25 antennas (one facing north and one facing south down Route 11). I haven't gotten a new pic of that either, but the B25 antennas are the same as the one I just found in Woodstock at CHS. They are very small antennas mounted to a telephone pole in both instances.

 

Those small B25 only "antennas" are actually ALU MCO (metro cell outdoor) small cells.

Edited by ajm8127
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Those small B25 only "antennas" are actually ALU MCO (metro cell outdoor) small cells.

I went back later and got some pictures and posted them in the thread on the ALU Pico cells. I think I put a link from this thread to the other thread too.

 

Sent from my Note 4.

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Small Cell photos - SHENTEL territory, Hagerstown, Md

I see a COMMSCOPE name on the equipment.

Verified to be using Band 25.  Was not able to prove it was ONLY band 25.

Appears to be an OMNI antenna. Did not appear to be a 3 sector standard cell type set-up.

A small shopping center was on both sides of the road.  This area is on somewhat low ground, so it did have a weak signal previously.   I did notice that the range of the cell is somewhat low.  As soon as you move a block or two away, the macro sites take over.  That could be expected as the site is not on high ground or on some high structure.  Overall, it does not appear to have near the ""punch" of a macro cell. 

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