mozamcrew

I well then I wonder if the antennas and RRUs are for ATT (I think the bottom rack is VZ) Tmo is all EDGE here so I don't think it's them.

I'd say TMO is stuck on AWS for the time being, VZW is stuck on 700 with AWS in some markets, and ATT is a mess with it's 700 and AWS holdings and WCS is at least a year from beginning deployments. ATT and VZW don't have enough 800 and PCS in their larger markets at their current site density, to begin converting that to LTE in most markets. Until they can get some voice/data off of their 800/PCS legacy networks, they will be in a crunch for a couple years, though ATT at least has WCS nearly everywhere.

So I checked the map, and the tower I took the pictures at isn't a current Sprint tower according the the Dakota, Minnesota, Northern Wisconsin map. I'm pretty sure there was a Nextel site that used to be at the top of this tower, and my signal from Signal Check was in the 50s when I took this. The pictures are from the corner of 13th Ave S and 25th St in Fargo. The closest Sprint site appears to be a few blocks north on 7th Ave S. Robert, or someone else, can you confirm that this location used to be a Nextel Site?

It may only be 15k towers, but I bet nealy half of their coverage AREA is 2G/EDGE.

TheyAre Finally working in Fargo. TookThis This Morning. https://picasaweb.google.com/102694651519037470193/S4gru#5910614445366803378

the "all in" plan includes 5Gb of hotspot. plus everything from the $80 my way plan with unlimited data. 1Gb hotspot is $10, 2gb hotspot is $20, and 6gb hotspot was $50 iirc. So the deal is on the hotspot pricing, but you also can't discount it .. so I see your point. There should be some additional perks to having the "all in" plan.

Looks like there is a site on S University to me, two actually. I'd really recommend looking at the market map here. http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/4186-network-vision-site-map-minnesota-dakotas-milwaukee-and-north-wisconsin-markets/ You need to be a sponsor, but I'd say it's worth it to get access to both the NV sites complete and market maps.

It's on the clearwire map, it's a protection site.

Frankly, I'd like to see 3x3LTE everywhere on 800, instead of 5x5. In the markets where you had enough spectrum for a 5x5 LTE on 800 add a second 1x carrier instead.

Given T-Mobile's rural coverage, I fail to see how that would be any help. If the combined MPCS-TMUS can't make a go of it, I'd prefer they sell to a third party. I don't see much synergy with Sprint given their new NV plans and TMUS-MPCS's current strategy. Perhaps a shared 600Mhz network? But that would be many many years down the road.

My guess is existing ILECs (incumbent local exchange carriers) and cable companies will continue to try to eke out improvements with their existing infrastructure, primarily because they have so much invested in it already. For them it's more cost effective to simply try to eke out performance improvements at the margin than to recreate their existing network. Maybe in new developments they COULD lay fiber, but the compatibility headaches with their existing networks means you'd have to upgrade everything connected to the local plant. Thus they have little incentive to convert from coax or twisted pairs to fiber. Most of the fiber deployments (FTTH, FTTN, or FTTC) I see are CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers). These small local carriers had to build out their own networks after the FCC stopped forcing ILECs to wholesale DSL loops to them. It put some of them out of business, but the ones that did survive are building modern networks that will support much better speeds than cable or the old telcos. These telcos offer speeds similar to cable, but with much better service and slightly better pricing in my experience.

I'm just hoping to see some LTE in Fargo before the end of summer.

This wouldn't happen any time soon. It's going to be a few years at the earliest before this happens. By that time they will have worked out a permanent arrangement for 800MSR that allows Sprint to use at least some of its 800 spectrum in IBEZ areas.

I assume most countries have some of both? Here's a good question. Will the WCS spectrum get a TDD or FDD band plan? Or does it already have a band plan that I don't know about?

Maybe they could set up the 600Mz in such a way as to include the 700Mhz A block in the new band?

Do they have spectrum in the adjacent C block there?

The reason to cap spectrum is to prevent carrier options for customers from becoming too limited in a given geographical market, thus preserving competition. You don’t want people that live in a particular town to only have one or two realistic options for cell service, which is what happens, particularly in suburban or rural areas where one carrier has all the low frequency voice spectrum. Eventually when we more entirely to LTE, this will be less of an issue, given all the additional 700 Mhz spectrum. In the meanwhile, I proposed forcing ATT (or VZW) to give up 850Mhz spectrum in markets where it owns both the A and B blocks. (There are only a handful of them.) Why divide it into two blocks if you let one carrier have the whole thing, or nearly so. My proposal: No carrier should own a majority of both the A and B block in a given geographical area. In the Dallas market for example, if ATT simply gave up 15Mhz of one of their blocks that would be fine. I'm sure a CDMA carrier could squeeze a bunch of voice/EVDO traffic on to a pair of 7.5 blocks. Maybe trade it with VZW for some needed AWS, I'm not proposing they get nothing in return for the divesture. I think allowing a carrier to have 50 Mhz of AWS & 50-60 Mhz PCS in a market is too much. Sprint would love to have 50Mhz, of PCS period, forget AWS. They only have that much in maybe one place now (thanks to the USCC deal), and up until the 800Mhz reband, they had to operate everything in PCS, no AWS or CLR850. I think a combined cap or 60 (or MAYBE 70 at most) Mhz of PCS+AWS should exist, certainly for carriers that already own CLR850 in a market and possibly some 700Mhz too. They are similar frequency, so they will have similar range and propigation.

My understanding is that almost all of MPCS CDMA network is going awa y once they get most of those customers on TMUS phones, which they will be pushing them to do as part of the merger. TMUS will be keeping about 2k of MPCS's 12k sites (probably in areas where TMUS doesn't already have coverage) and converting them to TMUS's network. When that happens the MPCS spectrum will be freed up for TMUS anyhow, without needing to do any swapping.

I would imagine they want to keep the 800 LTE channel for situations where you can't get a good signal with 1900? If you aggregate it then there will be less capacity there for people who can't get a signal on 1900. I'm not sold on channel aggregation as being an important feature.

Excellent timing, I plan on being on vacation right about the same time. Hopefully I'll be spending lots of time on this https://www.google.com/mapmaker?ll=47.003378,-95.064354&spn=0.030905,0.061197&z=14&q=Potato+Lake,+Hubbard,+MN&utm_source=mapseditbutton_normal&gw=30&lyt=large_map_v3 water.

The spectrum was "refarmed" the minute Sprint pulled the plug on Nextel at the end of June. Actually, in some markets it had been able to remove a few sites beforehand, since there weren't very many customers left on the network. They were able to remove some overlapping sites and transmit on fewer channels. So some places got a voice channel on 800 before Nextel even was shut down. Now that it's shut down, they will slowing start turning on 1xA and LTE on 800 and they go from site to site.

My guess is they will eventually disappear for new customers, once NV 2.0 is completed. The push to move existing customers will be more subtle though, at least I hope so.

I'm with you in spirit on this one Mac, I don't want the FCC micromanaging the spectrum allocations of different companies either. I think we just disagree in this specific instance about the size of the cap for this merger. I'm going to create another post to explain the rationale for my lower cap in this specific instance.

Why do you think that's unreasonable? Which parts? If it was 70Mhz of PCS + AWS would that make this ok?

Your 1x will be on BC 10 instead of BC 1 (or roaming on BC 0).