iansltx

It sounds like this is more global than just China and the US. The Wells Fargo call with Sprint and CLWR just now mentioned a few other urban-focused deployments of TD-LTE (e.g. Bharti Airtel), using similar spectrum to Clearwire. It also sounds like TD-LTE roaming will be in addition to whatever contracts for FD-LTE roaming get made. So you'll have devices with 2+ LTE bands: 2500 for TD plus something else when you're outside a hot zone.

LTE will address handshake/interconnection issues between CLWR and other carriers who want to buy wholesale capacity on Clearwire's network. Versus the CDMA-WiMAX shaky handover process. Re: uplink on low-band and downlink on high-band with carrier aggregation, it works on paper but "the devil is in the details". AT&T is trying to do that with WCS as the downlink, but that's somewhere in the 2017 range. Re: capacity improvements -> more usage, transitioning from pre-WiMAX to WiMAX with Clearwire more than doubled usage, all else equal. Re: WiMAX vs. LTE on Clearwire, interoperability/seamless handoffs are huge here, specifically when dealing with CLWR's use of TD-LTE as an offload mechanism. If you can push traffic over to Clearwire's network seamlessly when your own cells get hammered, that's a very good thing...but it's not possible unless everything is running on the same standard (as folks with CDMA/WiMAX phones can attest).

Listening now as well. CLWR will start with 20MHz TD-LTE channels. 40MHz (2x20 adjacent TD) will be coming in early 2014. Also, Sprint just said that the equipment on the tower right now allows for what sounds like both 800 and 1900 LTE without going back up the tower again. On Clearwire's side, a number of their radios can already do TD-LTE. So it's just a line card upgrade to add TD-LTE to those sites. Re: Low vs. High band spectrum, in capacity constrained markets, due to self-interference issues, you might actually see MORE cell sites on the low band due to self-interference issues. Clearwire just reiterated that they just want to augment capacity for other carriers using their huge spectrum portfolio. Re: LTE-A, Rel 10 will be deployed in Sprint's network (small cells and carrier aggregation are a couple of focuses) early next year.

Saw that. I should make a quick web app that will allow comparison between the two providers for a given data allotment/line count. AT&T's wrinkle of a sliding scale for smartphone pricing is...interesting. But in order to get the cheaper smartphone rates you'll be paying a lot on the data side. A *lot*. Oh, and you have LTE in a lot of places on Verizon that doesn't have LTE on AT&T.

Re: homes having lower electrical consumption than Nextel sites, keep in mind that homes have power usage spread across the entire place (with the exception of A/C0, while cell sites (and, really, any data center-esque environment) has really dense power requirements, which run nonstop. Factor in less than efficient cooling apparatus and you end up with some high power bills. Anyone want to multiply out several kilowatts per hour, every hour, for a month? Then add 50% onto that for cooling? I certainly don't want to pay that power bill.

Not completely wrong, but here are some corrections: 1. The iPhone doesn't support AWS. At all. Yes, this means that in some CricKet markets they can't sell the iPhone. But the iPhone currently has no AWS support. 2. VZW is keeping their upper-C 700 block. They paid a ton to get the same frequency across the entire country, so they're holding onto this competitive advantage. That said, any iPhone that has LTE on their network may not have LTE on lower 700 or SMR, since my guess is that Verizon will never allow LTE roaming on low frequencies except onto participants of their LTE in Rural America program, where they make the rules. AWS is a different story, but then again VZW won't have LTE on AWS for a while yet...none of their devices support it and none will until they get the SpectrumCo spectrum.

How about OrangeCell, since that's the color Sprint is using to paint LTE coverage?

Curious as to whether they'll let you get LTE devices...would be cool to have non-contract LTE service before Ting does.

Good old TCP slow start/fast recovery...

Sprint just got a big round of funding recently...pretty sure they can afford to push heavily to get more sites online more quickly than Samsung, Ericsson and AlcaLu are doing. Particularly since, with every market that ends up with solid NV coverage, they can sell more service in that market beause people notice that the network is better. The impact is lessened in areas where backhaul shortages force sites to go live as 3G-only, but at that point it's a quick proces to connect up the backhaul once the site gets it.

technically 1xRTT is a 3G tech, believe it or not

Hmm...I woner how difficult it would be to set up my own CloudRF server. It sounds like everything there is GPL'd, so all I'd need is hardware and a 'net connection...and I think I can manage grabbing both.

I can take a look (premiere sponsors can do this). Will shoot you a PM. 99% sure new equipment will have to be deployed, though 1xAdvanced at 800MHz is already going live in some places. EvDO will not be deployed on 800MHz...just 1xA now and LTE later. Probably just configuration issues. None of the "big four" caps data speeds to my knowledge, 3G or LTE, other than the 1.5M up WiMAX cap.

Yeah, looks like the article got a minor stealth edit. But the backhaul inaccuracy remains.

Robert jut updated site completion percentages for various LTE cities, Chicago included. It's now sitting at 35%, more than any Sprint market except maybe the Waco FIT. Granted, due I guess to backhaul issues most of these sites are still sitting on 3G, but once backhaul starts going online sites will be updated quickly with 4G, to the point that when CHI goes live in a few months coverage will probably be quite a bit more contiguous than what we're seeing today with Atlanta, San Antonio, Houston etc.

We already have a full list of cell sites for Sprint here, and nowhere near Robert will be getting LTE soon. So it's not really necessary to look for stuff like that On the other hand, I'll be in three different Sprint LTE markets over the next week or so (DFW, San Antonio, Austin) so I will definitely be doing cellular wardriving 8D

Welcome to S4GRU. Take a look at the speedtests of folks who are in current Sprint LTE markets. They're all over the map right now, but folks are getting some pretty high numbers. Not VZW in early 2011 numbers, but pretty high numbers nonetheless. Eventually that network, with that capacity, will hit your neighborhood (there's a thread in this forum with estimated dates or the first few rounds of markets). Though, depending on where you are, that may take a year or two. If you're in a market where Sprint will be applying band-aid 3G fixes (rather than Network Vision/LTE) for the next eighteen months, I wouldn't fault you at all for switching to VZ LTE (and its associated, low, caps and high overages per gigabyte). However don't knock Sprint LTE for the sole reason that you can't get it. Don't get me wrong. Sprint 3G performance is not great, to put it lightly, in many markets right now. Clear WiMAX is unreliable in many of the markets where it's deployed...I've used the former for the past five-plus years (five on contract, plus on and off before then back into 2005 or so when EvDO was just being released), and the latter over the past couple years when I've been able to find it. I, out of anyone, would be very likely to paint their LTE with a tainted brush from my past experiences. But it's a different animal...and that's why I now have another couple years on my Sprint contract, instead of a couple months, followed by two years with Verizon or T-Mobile (actually, I'd just get SIMple Mobile, but you get my point).

I can see 10 Gbps of backhaul per major market, or 100 Gbps for the entire country, but a single cell site can't do anything with more than a gigabit or so, unless it's a microwave hub. Even if you have four 5x5 LTE channels per sector, all running at full tilt, with six sectors on a cell site, that's still shy of 700 Mbps...and that's a stratospheric combination of carriers and sectors at this point. Never mind the fact that AT&T's backhaul RFQs call for two Ethernet PVCs with a sliding scale from 50 to 500 Mbps per PVC. I hear VZW is trying to get dark fiber to its cell sites but my guess is that, out of the hundreds of thousands of cell sites in the U.S. right now (spread over every single carrier), maybe a handful have anything more than a gigabit (or maybe a redundant gigabit) provisioned to them, with an actual commit of something much lower than 1 Gbps.

Added my 2¢ in the article comments...a bit more lengthy than the previous comment. As a current T_Mobile data customer, I can say for a fact that T-Mo's H+ network will be slower, on average, than Sprint's LTE one once Sprint is anywhere near complete with a market launch. Now, when T-Mobile launches LTE on its AWS spectrum, they'll have similar cell sizes to Sprint, even fewer customers, and maybe even the capacity to put i a 10x10 carrier in many places. But by that point Clear TD-LTE and Sprint SMR LTE should be online...and in some cases T-Mobile will have the exact same 5x5 LTE carrier size as Sprint, since T-Mo will have to keep 10 MHz of HSPA+ online in every market where they have AWS for the foreseeable future, and AWS is the only place they plan on deploying LTE for now.

You can set it to sniff all WiFi traffic in a given area (if the connection is unencrypted). Or if the connection is encrypted, I think you can still sniff anything on your LAN. Been awhile since I used it though.

Know how to use Wireshark? Install it on a computer on your local network, connect your phone to the same network, then fire up NetMonitor. You'll be able to see all traffic that transpires from your phone to whatever it's connecting to, NetMonitor included. My guess is that the phone will ask Google for its location, given a few parameters, so it can get a quicker GPS fix/tell where it is even if you don't have GPS turned on. Other than that, no information will be sent or received. Some developers are sloppy with the permissions they require on Google Play; it's just an XML file (having done Android development in the past) that guarantees that those functions will be available to the app if it needs to use them. The app doesn't have to use that functionality.