mozamcrew

Not true regarding "every other carrier on one band"

ATT - 700, aws, pcs, WCS

VZW - 700, AWS, pcs

TMO - AWS, pcs

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

I think at the very lest that's what the "all in" plan should do for 110 dollars a freaking month. 

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.

So things must be getting underway... At least I hope they are. There is no reason for this continuing.

 

Weeks now. Bouncing back and forth from 3g --> 1xRTT --> 3g --> No data --> 1xRTT. First it was towers were running slow we'll send out techs to investigate. Then it was LTE installation is starting at the S. University tower (which doesn't exist to my knowledge). And today is it's a data outage, engineers are looking into it. 

 

Pretty sad when data is this unreliable and slow from my work and home which are both a couple blocks away from two different Sprint towers. These speed tests were taken last night after work a few hundred yards away from the S. Fargo tower.

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.

Oh, ok. And I also found something a little interesting. I am in Park Rapids/Nevis for vacation, and as I was driving through town I decided to check sensorly for WiMAX. It showed nothing, but I turned on 4G anyways. Sure enough, there is WiMAX in Park Rapids! Thought it was  strange it wasn't on Sensorly. 

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

Yes, as long as they leave us all idle on 800, we all have a boatload of bars and great service. I question how long it will be until the 800 1X can handle the load and they have to do something.  Right now, only some of the customers are on the 800, As more are able to get 800, can it be overloaded??  If they force some of us to idle on 1900, the bars decrea

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.

800 will give Sprint better coverage in the major cities and the suburbs. In the more smaller cities and rural areas I'd expect Sprint to remain in 3rd place behind Verizon and AT&T. If Sprint wants to improve their rural coverage, in 5 years, I'd expect them to buyout T-Mobile.

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.

Will cable companies eventually upgrade with FTTH or can they keep on wringing speed improvements through docsis ?

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.

Still no action at the sites since they announced Fargo was in line to get upgrades 18APR13... Tweeted @sprint 14JUN13 as to a status and they said they were starting the upgrades in a few weeks. Tweeted back 02JUL13 asking for an update to those upgrades and they said they still have yet to start any NV upgrades. I drive by one site daily since it is a block or two away from my house and on my way to work and there is nothing happening there. On the weekend I take the motorcycle out and cruise by the other sites and still have yet to see anything there in terms of activity, tire tracks, new equipment and nada.

 

Sigh... No signs of signal changes either... still have a higher ping response than actual downstream to my phone. I swear if it weren't for my SERO plan I would've left a long time ago...

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

Which would be awesome for those of us in the Canadian IBEZ 

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 could be wrong, as I'm still learning all of this. But, isn't most of the world utilizing Time Division as opposed to Frequency Division architecture? I thought the US was one of the only countries to mainly use FDD?

 

Sent from my Sprint iPhone 5, not the old one (using Tapatalk 2)

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?

We have 10x10 in Albuquerque already. Blazin'!

 

Robert from Note 2 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

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.
 

I added a comment in the article, but I'll repost here for dicussion...

 

In NYC, why doesn't T-Mobile/MetroPCS swap one of the 5Mhz FDD LTE carriers with the 5Mhz FDD CDMA2000 carrier to create a contigious 10Mhz FDD LTE carrier?

 

The only limitation would be the actual mobile devices, do they support CDMA2000 in the AWS C or E blocks?

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.

Or at least aggregate the 800 mhz smr and the 1900 mhz pcs.

 

Since the other carriers are using FDD-LTE, would any of them be able to use LTE-A carrier aggregation across all of their bands?

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.

I'm Sry, I should have specified. I understand it is currently being worked on but is there a general timeframe for the completion of the 800mhz lte Or is it just part of NV and will "mostly" done by the end of 2013?

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.

I'm not debating whether or not they're planning on axing them, because no one here knows that for sure, and unless or until they do, it doesn't really matter; all the conjecture or supposition that they're going to at whatever point is completely moot.  At some point of course they'll change, and so will the new plans just released eventually whenever they come out with even newer plans, rinse/repeat.  

 

Right now, the previous plans are still available for those who care to either ask for them or do a little research, and that's not conjecture, but rather a fact.  Those that don't probably never knew about the Everything Data plans to begin with, and will make their decisions based on what they can and do see presented to them online or in stores.

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.

It caps the spectrum limit too low.  That's the unreasonable part.  I'm all for not letting one company control the whole enchilada - but you have to allow them to acquire spectrum pretty freely otherwise you might as well just lease it annually like AJ proposed (in another thread?).  The only reason to limit the amount is to not let one company monopolize (or duopolize) the market.  

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.

In my opinion, the FCC should require divestiture so that:

• They should not have more than 30Mhz of AWS in any one market upon completion of the merger.
• Their combined PCS + AWS in any market should not exceed 60Mhz upon completion of the merger.

And finally my blanket rule for all mergers involving ATT and VZW: Require them to divest any Cell 850 spectrum so they own no more than half the Cell 850 spectrum in a given market. They can do this through spectrum swaps or sales if they'd like. It's just stupid to have ATT or VZW owning both the A and B sides of the spectrum in a given market (or even all of one side and part of another). 

That's a little unreasonable.

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

How can I tell if I am using 800 mhz? I have the signal check app but don't know what it all means.

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

Lets just hope that Sprint can salvage something from the existing NV panels/antennas or RRUs for the H block.  It sucks that Sprint would have do all this for a 10 MHz block of spectrum but Sprint has shown great interest in the H block so they must have known going in that they would have to deal with this issue eventually.  I hope a firmware update is able to resolve this issue for the H block in the existing 1900 RRUs.  Hopefully Sprint can talk to the OEMs about how to deal with the H block situation with the existing 1900 RRUs.

You would think they would have planned for this when buying G block compatible antennas and RRUs, they had to know this was coming. Something like swapping out the 1900 RRU or just updating the firmware?