MrZorbatron

Providing affordable fixed services is an integral part of a BRS spectrum license. I don't see why you call it expensive, a piece of Cellular 850 or even PCS is far more valuable. The entire point of the 2500/2600 block is that it is easy to use for high capacity fixed broadband services. Mobile use was never part of the equation until Sprint was granted an exception for Xohm WiMAX, although they (and Clearwire) were required to provide fixed services at prices relatively competitive with wired connections. This requirement has not been removed, so I do expect to see an affordable fixed solutions in the near future. It's like Verizon and AT&T with the open access stipulation on their 700MHz spectrum. Like it or not, they are required to both allow all compatible devices to operate, and to allow data connections on all connected devices to be used in any manner and to access any connectable content or services without carrier interference. As far as speeds, 5 Mbps is the maximum fixed connection BRS is required to provide as I recall. It is also slow enough to not substantially interfere with higher speed operations, while being fast enough for every day use. Therefore, such a speed cap would be acceptable. I'm not a speed snob like a lot of people are. I understand the difference between usable and not. Frankly, a 2Mbps connection will help you get a job if you are unemployed as well as a 20Mbps or 200Mbps one will. It will also keep you hooked up with your corporate email, letters to grandma, recipes for dinner, travel planning, etc. I am talking about using a connection as an essential tool, not for high quality video and media content here.

I would like to see a 5 Mbps fixed service on 2.5 only. I think that is a reasonable basic broadband for home for someone who is not data intensive and doesn't want to deal with wired ISPs.

Yeah but that's for extreme distances over high tension transmission lines. It is used to monitor loading and otherwise keep tabs on the health of the system. Among other things, this allows lines that are near capacity to have some loads decreased and redirected in order to save money.

In some markets, meter reading is done over the power line, but at very low (kHz) frequencies, and with maximum data rates around 100 kbps. In other markets, a radio device is used to send the signal to a car that drives by. Increasingly rarely, a system utilizing a phone line is employed. BPL is dead yes for this reason.

Incorrect. At short/medium distance, they can hit speeds comparable to previous generation cable (DOC 2.x) or previous generation DSL (ADSL2), but ADSL2+ and any flavor of VDSL clobbers it. Power line broadband also causes horrendous radio interference despite claims by vendors to have minimized it. At long distance, it works at only a few hundred kilobits per second and is used for monitoring power transmission network health and operational conditions. This is a different, though semi-related, technology to what is used in household homeplug systems.

No. Assuming whatever SDR supported the correct frequencies, you would need to still analyze the signal in order to determine what it is. Maybe you could make a guess by checking out subcarrier spacing, but it wouldn't be exact and it wouldn't determine the carrier (provider). Far too many opportunities for false positives if you ask me...

1xRTT is not 2G, it is a third generation technology.

They look like Sprint and Sprint does use those panels, but they arent. I will grab a complete picture later.

There are a couple in south Oakland County, IIRC in the Southfield area, that had legacy antenna gear on racks but NV gear directly mounted to the tower itself. My pictures of one of those sites are in the "How to spot" thread for Samsung IBEZ hardware. And no, the panels directly above the NV hardware are not Sprint. Sprint has 6 coaxial cables running from their boxes up the tower and there was a rack above with the same pair of narrow rectangular antenna panels that Sprint uses almost everywhere around me.

The EVO LTE has been noted many times and in many places for poor LTE reception and in fact relatively poor RF performance in general, especially for a high end device.

No and yes. Both signals travel an infinite distance from their sources, decreasing in strength all the way, until they eventually become too weak to be demodulated by a receiver. LTE signals will have exactly the same strength as CDMA signals sent from the same location on the same frequency with the same radio output power. LTE does have a substantially more fragile structure, both due to the complexity of the modulation and the fact that LTE (as with GSM) cannot function correctly with a negative signal to noise ratio, while CDMA can. This has always been one of the biggest advantages CDMA had for coverage in RF-difficult areas.

Sounds like a lot of cheap real estate to me. In the days before elevators, the higher the floor, the less desirable the office/living space. The top floor office was literally the cheapest spot you could get. When elevators came along, that was precisely reversed.

T-Mobile uses the same cabinets in most markets as the old Sprint Ericsson cabinets, plus the fact that their radio units are very distinct looking.

Bottom truck is tmobile.

Why not a clear picture of the gear at the top of the tower and of the base equipment at the bottom?

1Mb/min is about 16Kbps. If only you spent the time on 28.8Kbps that I did in the past, you would shut your mouth and show some appreciation. My introduction to the internet was via a 9600bps modem, and I was on BBSes with less than that.

What is 1mb? Do you mean 1MB or 1Mb? I assume it's per second either way. I get 1Mbps on 3G reliably and often 2MB on LTE. Case matters!

I don't think the exchange even means much of anything now. The 800 number is Nextel support desk though. I didn't even know that number was still in use.

Call 888-211-4727 from a land line phone. Hit 4, then 4, then 5 through the menu. Alternatively, 4, then 4, then 1 for "if you can't make or receive calls"

They should not need to significantly modify the "tree" parts.

Tree? Real or false?

I don't even see why this is relevant to the city. Why should you need approval to remove a couple to four big refrigerator to bigger-than-refrigerator sized cabinets, replace them with a couple of small refrigerator sized cabinets, replace six old antennas with three new ones and 3-6 tower mounted radios, and generally neaten up and compact almost everything in the base of the site? Cities are idiotic.

From what I read, MINIMUM fiber capacity to a NV site is 120Mbps, and that isn't sufficient for full functionality. Fully loaded would be a bit over 100 between the three sectors for each LTE frequency, 10Mbps between the three sectors per carrier for EVDO, with at least 2 EVDO carriers, 1x voice capacity, and management overhead etc. It's possible they will try to get away with less out in the middle of nowhere, but I can't see less than 68 Mbps being practical. 68 Mbps also happens to be the smallest microwave link they have registered with FCC. Fiber is cheap now, relatively speaking. The cost difference is so small that it's not worth worrying about going cheap on backhaul. This means to ideally supply a site with both bands of LTE would total around 260 Mbps. LTE 1900 + 800 = 225Mbps EVDO 1900 * 3 ch = 28.8Mbps 1xA 1900 * 3 = 4Mbps. 1xA 800 * 1 = 1.3Mbps Additional carriers of any sort would add to this requirement. Now think of little old T1 with 1.54 Mbps... Great for one 1xRTT carrier for all three sectors and that's about it. Want to feed the above site with T1s? That'll be 169 bonded T1 lines, totaling 4056 bonded channels, or in other words, 8112 wires using conventional T1s.

Sprint will not be the fastest in terms of out and out speed to a single user, though will likely end up with the highest capacity in at least half of places due both to number of separate LTE carriers in a given market and to PCS cell spacing. Imagine 2-3 5x5 channels, each with its 38Mbps capacity that a phone could select between to distribute loading. Modern base station hardware can balance loading by essentially kicking a device off of a more crowded channel and onto one with lighter load. What would you rather have? Fewer larger channels can have higher peak speeds to fewer devices, but there is much less inherent load balancing. A crazy user could slow everyone else down. 50 megabit speed to a phone is more or less useless. It's like putting a Corvette engine in a Yugo. It's more speed than you could need and more power than you could even keep on the pavement. More and narrower channels can have the same capacity, though individual users on an uncrowded network would not be able to access as much of it. 10MHz channels can offer up to 76Mbps in raw capacity. While this will look good on paper and in reviews, you are holding a phone in your hand, not a server. Additionally, a small number of idiots could bring the entire 10x10 channel to a crawl through programs that create excessive numbers of TCP/IP connections. This is the problem I ran into recently in an apartment complex that my company recently wired for central high speed internet, to be included with rent (along with all other utilities). It's fed by a 100Mbps connection. There are 22 units. One would think that that is more than enough speed to go around, and it was all great until we started getting complaints of slow service to the point that college students were unable to stream lectures (under 800Kbps). When I went through the statistics on the router and switches, I found that the capacity was being all used up. My solution was to limit the switches in each building to 8192Kbps to one port in each unit, or a little over 8 megabits, and 4096Kbps to the other, giving each unit a maximum capacity of 12 Mbps. Even though this is still far more than the total bandwidth available by about 175%, the complaints of slow service immediately ended. The difference between ports was explained clearly. A solid 5-6 Mbps with low latency would have most cellular users extremely happy. The only way they would ever know the difference would be if downloading something huge. I can personally say that I have done some pretty big downloads such as computer security tool updates, OS updates, etc, on Sprint's LTE and WiMAX networks, but I use a utility that throttles download rate and connection count. I just let them run while I am in the car and as long as the download is finished by the time I get where I am going, a limit of 4 megabits serves me well in downloading Dr. Web CureIT, at 110 MB, in under 15 minutes. Incidentally, before anyone starts accusing me of abusing the network, I DID run this by Sprint before i started doing it. They told me that this is acceptable within the unlimited data smartphone plan as long as I am doing this download or streaming of content onto the phone to be later transferred off, and not onto a device tethered to it by USB or wifi. My monthly data use typically runs from 1.5 to 4 GB. Incidentally, I got a Manhattan out of one of my local friends while I was sitting at the bar finishing up some paperwork at Christi's in Orion Township because my Sprint LTE beat his Verizon 2 out of 3 times. My numbers were between 18 and 26 megabit and his were between 13 and 27.

They did the reverse of that near me, in Clarkston, MI, at I-75 and M-15. No activity at all, no new hardware, neither cabinets or on tower, as of under two weeks ago. About a week ago, less than a week after I checked it out, all the new hardware is installed and the site is online with LTE.