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At some point over the weekend, T-Mobile bumped the Omaha metro from 100+40 to 100+90 of n41! That's a pretty large increase from what we had just a few weeks ago when we were sitting at 80+40Mhz. Out of curiosity, tested a site on my way to work and pulled 1.4Gpbs. That's the fastest I've ever gotten on T-Mobile! For those that know Omaha, this was on Dodge street in Midtown so not exactly a quiet area!

Drove from Omaha to KC this weekend. There were a number of n41 sites that previously only had 50 or 50+20Mhz on air and didn't allow for the n41 channel to be the primary channel on SA NR. As of this past weekend (probably sometime last month) all of them had 100 + at least 40Mhz of n41 and had n41 as the primary channel. A couple of them had 100+90. The network in KC was also increased to 100+90 since the last time I was here, giving a total of 15 n71, 20 + 5 n25, 100 + 90 n41. Pulled 1.2Gbps on a random site at 5pm Saturday afternoon.

New T-Mobile site went live earlier this year at 5 W 86th St, just off of Central Park. It's not a Sprint conversion so I hope this means more new builds are gonna stop popping up in areas that need coverage the most. — — — — — Also spotted a unicorn (mapped a new AT&T site) in Greenpoint. It's eNB ID 115932/119932. I spotted the permit a super long time ago but it looks like it finally went live earlier this month. That makes 5 new AT&T sites in Brooklyn in the past 2 years. — — — — — Noticed that I touched a Sprint conversion site while mapping today. It has been live since at least December and is already on the keep site map. Sprint eNB 74215 -> T-Mobile gNB 1371628 Located at: 40.767977371545726, -73.96146218469505 Still a bunch more we've found that don't have any decommission permits submitted yet. — — — — — Adding a bunch of gig+ sites I haven't reported yet. eNB 44076 Located at 40.72513188568983, -73.95130108843207 eNB 44110 Located at 40.78671665921442, -73.97831748836762 eNB 47002 Located at 40.71818871096234, -73.97553242675835 eNB 48023 Located at 40.70014576627346, -73.95511802661758 eNB 129912/130917 Located at 40.71727220756978, -73.95652417532955 eNB 875917 Located at 40.72274052431834, -73.84403351784677 eNB 49849 Located at 40.72181611705532, -73.86627810663067

Here in NYC I don’t think NextWave even has any clients. By my count they only have about two dozen sites deployed across the entire city. It’s pretty much a network only put up to try to pressure T-Mobile into buying them by forcing T-Mobile to switch their n41 configuration from 140MHz to 80MHz over a growing portion of the city. That’s not competitive with Verizon who has 160MHz citywide. I hope we get to the point soon where T-Mobile decides it’s worth it to just buy out NextWave, take over their leases, and finally have a full 190MHz across the city.

Progress!

Drove out into the country today. Dish stuck to my phone like glue. At least -120 rsrp. Likely only good for phone calls (should have tested.) It then switched to T-Mobile. Getting back on Dish was another issue. I am used to dragging out coverage so I expected a few miles, but had to drive at least 10 miles towards a Dish site. Airplane mode, which worked for Sprint, did nothing. Rebooting did nothing. Finally got it to change over about 2 miles from the site by manually setting the carrier to Dish then it had great reception. Sprint used to have a 15 minute timeout but I did not have the patience today. Previously I did a speed test on Dish out in the country at the edge of Dish coverage. My speeds were 2g variety. Dish has really overclocked some of these sites. Seen rssp readings in the 50s. Would have called them boomer sites with Sprint but much more common with Dish.

Musical Plant

Definite usage quirks in hunting down these sites with a rainbow sim in a s24 ultra. Fell into a hole yesterday so sent off to T-Mobile purgatory. Try my various techniques. No Dish. Get within binocular range of former Sprint colocation and can see Dish equipment. Try to manually set network and everybody but no Dish is listed. Airplane mode, restart, turn on and off sim, still no Dish. Pull upto 200ft from site straight on with antenna. Still no Dish. Get to manual network hunting again on phone, power off phone for two minutes. Finally see Dish in manual network selection and choose it. Great signal as expected. I still think the 15 minute rule might work but lack patience. (With Sprint years ago, while roaming on AT&T, the phone would check for Sprint about every fifteen minutes. So at highway speed you could get to about the third Sprint site before roaming would end). Using both cellmapper and signalcheck.net maps to hunt down these sites. Cellmapper response is almost immediate these days (was taking weeks many months ago). Their idea of where a site can be is often many miles apart. Of course not the same dataset. Also different ideas as how to label a site, but sector details can match with enough data (mimo makes this hard with its many sectors). Dish was using county spacing in a flat suburban area, but is now denser in a hilly richer suburban area. Likely density of customers makes no difference as a poorer urban area with likely more Dish customers still has country spacing of sites.

Good catch! I meant 115932/119932. Edited my original post I've noticed the same thing lately and have just assumed that they're skipping it now because they're finally able to deploy mmWave small cells.

Nissan Skyline

City Skyline

Finally got a rainbow sim after about a year of occassionally trying. N70, n71, and n66 working on byod s24 ultra. Speed around 550Mbps down, 40 up during rush hour: https://imgur.com/a/ENhnSI2

Face Plant

horse face

Goat Shoes

Correction: T-Mobile has 100+80 MHz n41 live here. I didn't see it yesterday so either they just turned it on, it's temporary capacity for the eclipse, or maybe something else. But that means that T-Mobile has as much mid-band online here as they do in Austin, though I'm 99.9% sure their sites here only have a gig of backhaul (which is plenty for the area tbh). Also, VZW has B48 on some of their macros here, so a bit better than just AWS-or-less LTE. And AT&T actually *does* have n77 here (standard 80+40 setup), albeit with hit-or-miss coverage so I'm guessing it's only on a couple of sites.

On the Florida Atlantic coast this weekend and have watched VZW and T-Mobile. FLL had VZW mmW in Terminal 4. T-Mobile has decent (not perfect) n41 coverage with 100+50 MHz, with 20x20 n25 on top of that. Heading north, n41 switches pretty quickly to 100+80 MHz, with pretty consistent coverage along I-95 and the Turnpike. A-1A coverage is patchier between Stuart and Fort Pierce, so I switched to VZW (which was more consistent there) on part of that drive. VZW has 100+60 MHz n77; coverage is less consistent than n41 but there are a number of areas where VZW clocks 500+ Mbps when T-Mobile is 300-400 Mbps. Some TMo sites do have gig+ backhaul though; I got a 1.1+ Gbps test indoors yesterday in Stuart. I'll report on AT&T and Dish later.

New AT&T speed record for me. I encountered an AT&T site with upgraded backhaul in Crown Heights. I'm certain I can hit 1Gbps on this site off-peak.

I've always wanted to go Newfoundland. And possibly Labrador. And Saint Pierre. Don't forget to stop at Mary Brown's Chicken. They're great. They are all over Canada now, but the chain started in Newfoundland. Robert

Just wanted to provide a brief update on SignalCheck development progress.. a beta version is in the final stages of testing, and if everything works well, I will be rolling out a public update next week. Dual-SIM support is in testing and working fairly well. However, it may not be included in this next update, as there are a couple of hiccups that still need to be ironed out. I do intend to have it ready in the near future though. The upcoming version has a lot of significant changes, behind the scenes and user-facing. Countless bug fixes, many stability improvements, and some new features. As long as things go smoothly once it is released, dual-SIM and other cool stuff should not be far behind. Stay tuned and thanks for the support!