WiWavelength

Why in the world would they do that? They did realize that Nextel has never supported AMPS and did not offer any analog airlink either. AJ

Sprint in Puerto Rico is not apt to utilize SMR 800 MHz anytime soon because other licensees hold the spectrum. AJ

They are. Network Vision 2.0 does not replace the current initiative. Any Sprint LTE device activated today should be data compatible for at least the next 5-10 years. AJ

Maybe. No one knows for certain. No band 26 LTE 800 devices have been disclosed in the FCC OET database yet. A lot will depend upon the release dates of upcoming devices. Now, this question has come up numerous times before, so please do a search before creating a new thread. AJ

No, a simple pill just will not cut it. For the tinfoil hat crowd, we need to create and market an anti RF anal suppository. Sure, it is the size of a football. But if you are really concerned about RF, shove this up your butt, and you will be protected. Trust us. AJ

People look for RF exposure as a simple excuse for headaches, ADHD, etc. They fail to recognize that pace of life and demand for constant connectivity are the far more likely causes of their ailments. Plenty of towns in rural Kansas would be happy to have those people and reduce those causes, not to mention, limit their RF exposure simply due to distance. But few of those people would accept that lifestyle. Thus, their maladies are at least partly their own doing. AJ

I think that Gary Forsee and company looked around the industry, saw increasingly threatening consolidation, then looked at Nextel's largely business/industrial sub base and below 1 GHz/above 2.5 GHz spectrum and saw complementary assets. Any potential conflicts were just collateral damage. I also still believe that if Sprint had not gotten Nextel, then VZW would have for the business/industrial sub base, and the W. Bush administration would have rubber stamped that merger, too. I gotta run but can write at greater length later. We may also want to branch this discussion off to its own thread or merge it with an existing Nextel thread, as we are starting to run pretty far afield from the original topic. AJ

Right. The Nextel (and/or Nextel Partners) acquisition effectively violated a non compete agreement that Sprint had with its own affiliates, even though Sprint retained control of all of the spectrum in question. AJ

I apologize if I have posted some version of this polemic before. I probably have. But I am long since convinced that most people really have little idea how cellphones actually operate. They want cellphone service, but somehow without RF. The sad thing is that, even if RF were a legitimate cause for concern, the emitters to be concerned about would not be the cell sites that so many ill informed people oppose. The signal strength from those base stations is already well below 1 mW even 50 feet from the antennas. No, the emitters to be concerned about would be the cellphones that nearly all of them use because cellphones can radiate greater than 200 mW right up the sides of their dimwitted heads. And what they almost universally fail to understand is that the less dense the cell site network is, the greater the power that their cellphones have to emit. So, unless they avoid cellphones altogether, their cell site opposition actually, ironically works against their RF aversion. science > belief AJ

Some enterprising developer needs to build the wireless nerd master planned community, one that actually encourages cell sites. AJ

Robert is no NIMBY; he is an IMFY. AJ

You are stretching the facts a bit. The iPCS acquisition did not close until basically this time three years ago. Sprint could do nothing prior to that point. By that time, Sprint was getting rather cash strapped and further deployment was not in the offing. Furthermore, the iPCS territory in question was acquired in a merger with yet another Sprint affiliate, Horizon PCS. So, who knows what "Frankenstinian" mix of infrastructure from various, potentially cheap vendors these markets contain. Additionally, by the first few months of 2010, the start of Network Vision was only 18 months away. Had Sprint deployed EV-DO in these former affiliate CDMA1X only areas, that infrastructure would have ended up being scrapped just three years later. So, I give Sprint a free pass on this one. The affiliates almost universally screwed up. They thought they had a good idea at the height of the tech bubble around the millennium, but they got in over their heads and did not pan out. My point, though, is really this: we can both look at the situation from the benefit of hindsight. You see a negative -- Sprint should have done more sooner. And I see a positive -- Sprint did well to hold off on renovating these areas until Network Vision. And, you know what, we are both right. AJ

It is Sprint corporate footprint now, but that is a relatively recent development because it was iPCS affiliate coverage until only three years ago. And that is why many sites are only CDMA1X, which is still 3G, by the way. But iPCS dragged its heels deploying EV-DO in its markets and never did in many rural areas. AJ

Maybe. That depends upon propagation. But CDMA1X and EV-DO are wholly separate, so one does not affect the other. AJ

As John McLaughlin would say... AJ

In the bayou, that "guy" would be your grandmother, right? AJ

Early returns in Chicagoland and Waco indicate "yes" -- or, at least, "maybe." AJ

No need to apologize. The "best case scenario" for CDMA1X Advanced capacity increases just does not bear out in the real world. It relies upon full implementation of CDMA1X receive diversity and 4GV vocoder. But you will not find full implementation among all Sprint handsets. My theory, which I put forth about six months ago, is basically this: Sprint should move all postpaid accounts to idle on the one CDMA1X 800 carrier. Outside of stadium environments, it should have enough access/paging channel capacity to support all subs. For traffic channel capacity, though, the network will have to move calls periodically to CDMA1X 1900 carriers as needed and as propagation permits. As for prepaid and MVNOs, keep those accounts exclusively on the CDMA1X 1900 carriers. They are not paying for 800 MHz. AJ

The number of CDMA1X carriers varies a lot from site to site and market to market, so there is no generalization. Furthermore, the CDMA1X Advanced "4x increase in capacity" is a platitude that should not be repeated so often because it does not really hold true. AJ

I imagine the "war room" being something like this... AJ

Using the EVO LTE, I circumnavigated a local LTE site. Here is a screen cap of my results: For comparison purposes, here is a screen cap of one sector on the LTE engineering screen: A few conclusions... We may have found an app that displays physical cell ID on all handsets. Note the integer values 129, 130, 131. They do not differ by the typical 169 interval, but that could be market dependent. This is also the first Android app I have seen that ostensibly identifies LACs, which are the GSM/W-CDMA/LTE equivalent of CDMA1X NIDs. The interesting thing about LAC 43 above is that it shares the same number with CDMA1X NID 43 in this area. So, I surmise that Sprint is numbering and shaping its LTE LACs to match its CDMA1X NIDs in many/all cases. Now, boomerbubba really needs to take a look at these findings... AJ

Thanks for the report. This confirms our examinations of internal Sprint documents last Spring that indicated Sprint could not deploy on SMR 476 in SouthernLINC markets, but would deploy on SMR 526 instead. AJ

It is a frequency domain sweep of the SMR 800 MHz band formerly occupied by Nextel iDEN. One of our members, leerage, tipped us off to some CDMA1X 800 in the vicinity of Topeka. I checked it out tonight and got the CDMA1X 800 carrier channel on my spectrum analyzer. CDMA1X 800 is not any big news. Subs in several markets (Chicago, Boston, etc.) have been able to use CDMA1X 800 on selected sites for a while now. But this is the first RF sweep of it that we have captured. If iDEN 800 were still active, you would see several tall, narrow spikes in the sweep. But the 1.25 MHz wide plateau you see centered at 862.9 MHz is CDMA1X 800 carrier channel SMR 476. AJ

No AT&T stocks, bonds, or anything. Those are as worthless as Republic Dataries. I need something more real, like a used van or some celebrity undergarments. AJ

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you CDMA1X 800... AJ