MrZorbatron

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.

Okay in my room. moving around, i get 1 bar.. No 4G lol. I let my phone sit, it connects to 4G and my service is amazing.. Speed tests almost 1mb On 4G.. Does anyone else get better service if they let there phone sit?

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"

The fake trees used to camouflage cell antennas.

 

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The fact that particular site has a half of a tree antenna mast may have something to do with needing city approval?

 

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Tree?  Real or false?

A fellow member here gave me a link to a city permit hearing for a cell site upgrade. The application was dated in march. I emailed the city last week and they said that they will come up with a decision on whether it will be approved or not at the end of this month. That's 4 months!

 

Not the original question, but it shows you how San Diego works.

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.

Even if a site has fiber Sprint is still paying for a circuit. Usually 20/50mbps but that totally depends on the metro fiber availability.

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.

So when all updates are said and done, can we expect Sprints new network to be faster and more efficient than any other network? I saw in PC mag that AT&T dominated as far as speed, with verizon not very far behind at all. Of course Sprint was last, but they expressed dramatic signs of improvement

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 sneaked in and installed cabinets and new antennas and had it 3g accepted in 3 days on a site by me.  That was almost 2 months ago.  Still no LTE.  Damn Time Warner hasn't hooked up the back haul yet.  Or they haven't been back to turn it on and test it.  I prefer to blame TWC though.

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.

Does anyone know what thresholds need to be crossed before you get a message announcing the upgrades for your area?  Is it:

 - a percentage of local sites being worked on?

 - a percentage of local sites having been completed?

 - a percentage of active coverage for a specific service (NV 3G, 4G) in your area?

 - activation of a cluster of 3G sites?

 - any combination of the above scheduled for the immediate future?

I got this message today:

If you check LTE coverage for 48362 (Lake Orion, MI) on Sensorly, you will see a lot of coverage, but not of particularly high density.  If you check the sites completed and sites in progress in the area (sponsors), you will see that some sites are done, some are not, but more than half serving this area are either done or in progress.  There is presently no NV 3G here.

exclusion not enforcement.

Interesting!  I frequent one spot where I get less than 1Mbps speeds on a LTE connection.  I always assumed the backhaul was not in place but maybe it is just low signal.  Thanks!

Download signal check and look.  It was created by a member here.  Otherwise, you can just check your phone's debug screen.

Another possibility other than low signal exists as well.  If you are in a fairly dense area and only one or two sites have LTE service, then those sites could easily be seriously overloaded.  The easiest way to spot this is to run a speed test.  If your speed test shows the speed figures to be upside-down, as in with your transmission capacity significantly higher than your reception capacity, then your site is most likely substantially overloaded.  There are cases of sites over capacity that will not test like this, but it is uncommon.

Pretty sure Sprint sites may advertise LTE regardless if the backhaul is in place or if it has not yet been accepted by Sprint.  Also, someone can correct me if I am wrong but as more sites go are accepted, the general performance will increase.  At my house, I noticed my speeds increase from an approximate average of 5Mbps to 15+Mbps after all three sites surrounding me were LTE accepted by Sprint.

Completely incorrect.  The LTE signal is not ever enabled until the high capacity backhaul is installed.  If you see an apparently high signal level, LTE, and bad speed,you need to check the actual LTE signal level because often LTE is from a different source site than that which is providing your CDMA connection.

It's actually really useful this way because of the way the "breathing" phenomenon affects CDMA far more than LTE.  With LTE, as utilization goes up, the only issue beyond link saturation is an increase in crosstalk and packet errors.  With CDMA, both a serious increase in the noise floor occurs and the base radio's effective power output decreases as a result of increasing complexity of modulation and in severe cases, of deliberate reduction in transmission power in order to decrease the service radius of the site to combat this issue and force subscribers onto adjacent cells.  It is therefore easily possible for a site to be overloaded with 1x (voice or 1x data) traffic but not with data traffic, either EVDO or LTE.  It's even possible on some devices (SVDO capable models) for EVDO and 1xRTT connections to be to different sites.  In an area with significant cell density and with moderate overlap, the benefit of this arrangement becomes even more apparent.

Didn't the S3, for example, originally ship in CDMA only mode? Sprint should make a point of making LTE active by default in any firmware updates for LTE devices.

Mine was on auto CDMA/LTE.  CDMA Only mode should only be used for troubleshooting, which is by definition a temporary condition.

“If the tower was to come down instruments on top of the towers could have become projectiles, exploded on crash"

 

 

 

Doesn't that sound a bit over dramatic? Exploding on crash? Hollywood much?

Very over-dramatic.

The sun emits solar flares all the damn time. ROFl But you are not understanding it's the year of solar maximum.. It's like an EMP, EMP's destroy equipment.

They've been talking about how if a STRONG enough solar flare hit the earth, it'd knock out power in most of the world. There was one strong enough released, but it missed earth.

to your

 

"This can cause power fluctuations and brown outs, but the likelihood of a widespread blackout is very, very small.

"http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/2013/solarmax/

Read from a reputable source.  An extremely strong EMP can fry electronics.  A little bit of EMI or RFI as would be produced by sunspots and solar flares might cause a few single bit errors on a complicated enough computer system, so your Windows box might bluescreen, Mac might say you need to reset your computer, and UNIX might kernel panic, but otherwise no permanent harm will be done.

I remember when idiots were lining up to pay dishonest technology companies thousands and tens of thousands to "audit" their PC based, Mac, or UNIX systems for "Y2K" bullshit.  At the end, it was all a big nonissue except for a few dinosaur mainframes and midrange systems.

My point is, research things before you go overboard.  You sound like the bozos who just passed around petitions citing health concerns for 6 months, trying to get the township to forbid Verizon from building a tower about 5 miles from here.  Be careful what you read on the web.  Also, don't read Gizmodo because they love to trumpet things like this.

Speaking of unity, the European Union is about to heavily regulate with the intent of eventual abolition of roaming charges between compatible carriers within its member countries.

Define what you mean by that.  Signal strength is dependent upon a great many variables.

 

AJ

I was just about to call him out on that one, too.

Current Nextel sites use three to four antenna panels, which tend to be deep and narrow, per sector, making 9 to 12 per site.  Some older and still functional sites are still using the omnidirectional segmented monopole or vertical dipole antennas, of which there would generally be two.  In these cases, the site works as a single sector but all practical operational matters remain the same otherwise.

Don't forget that most city or county trunked radio services use very similar looking equipment.

You can often tell what frequency an open element antenna is optimized for by its segment length.  You often have to get very close to the antenna to be able to tell the segment length, however.  It will be height of the full wave, half wave, or quarter wave.  For a center frequency of 850MHz, that would be about a 30cm if I remember correctly.  This means that the antenna will be a collection of 3 to 4 segments that are each 30cm in length that are electrically isolated from one another and recombined to operate as an antenna array.  From a distance, it would be a stick about 4-5' long.

Yes, but except for very rare cases, and unless using microwave backhaul, this combination of boxes and frame is installed just before the cabinets.  If it is not installed before they arrive, it is installed before they are moved to final position.

At least in Michigan, this is how they have been bringing fiber from the backhaul provider to the new cabinets.  This frequently, but not always, shows up before cabinets.  Backhaul is never installed before this structure is present.

Often times, this is installed much before the new cabinets are.  In all cases, the new cabinets are installed with their backs to this structure.

I have picked this site because it does not even have new cabinets installed yet:

Here is a similar installation after the cabinets have been installed but not yet connected:

In this case, the fiber isn't even there yet.  There is only a conduit that leads into that box marked "Fiber", taped off, with only a pull string in it, that leads to outside of the fenced area:

Commiserate with your compatriots in the IBEZ along the Mexican border by cracking open a Dos Equis.  Not having SMR 800 MHz makes you "The Most Interesting Man in the World."

 

 

AJ

Yeah and it makes them not recognize my photographs too.

Sprint is deploying 800MHz voice now in about 2-3 dozen markets. Some of these have started noticing 800 voice going love, or will very shortly. 800MHz travels farther and penetrates much better. The remaining markets will start 800 voice deployment this summer. It will take another 6-9 months to complete 800 voice implementation nationwide,

 

Starting this summer, Sprint will also start deploying LTE on 800MHz. LTE 800 will greatly improve Sprint LTE coverage. Especially in between cell site gaps and indoor coverage. It is estimated it will take a year to complete LTE 800 coverage.

 

Robert via Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

Let us not forget the Purgatory of the areas adjacent to the Canadian border. That 80-100 miles of hell affects a surprising number of people.