TheShark

Platteville is east of Longmont. From looking at the sensorly maps I suspect that the 4G hits in Platteville may be from the tower on I-25 that went live a couple of weeks ago. It's pretty flat out there so a tall tower might reach that far.

This topic should IMHO be re-titled. Clearing apps out of the app drawer is not a waste of time. There are lots of apps which do in fact create enough activity in the background to affect battery life. Skype and Facebook are but two examples. VoIP, chat and messaging apps in general tend to want to run in the background to keep their socket connections back to the server open. Yes, in theory they could all rely on push notifications to know when messages come in but in practice I think a lot of them only use that as a fallback for when the app is not running for some reason. And since the apps are using the network you get a bit of a double whammy because not only are they using CPU time but they are also bringing the radio up as well. So do I bother clearing out Notes and Calculator from the app drawer? No. But if I'm concerned about saving battery I do make sure Sykpe, Palringo, etc. are killed off.

Ah yes. Ebay of course. It's probably safe enough but I'm always a bit wary.

I don't see them for that price offhand. I did see some used Sprint phones on Glyde for not too much, but I think they are WiMax not LTE (EVO Shift 4G and Galaxy SII Epic 4G) A Boost Force for $170 is the best deal I can find so far.

It's hard to tell if the new coverage showing up on Sensorly is a new tower or just more samples coming in from the two which are definitely lit up. I have to admit I love this kind of data, I wish I could spend some time roaming around filling in the map. My lowly iPhone 4S obviously isn't up to the task though. What's the cheapest way to get a Sensorly compatible phone? Looks like there are some LTE options for $200-$250 or so. That's a little more than I'm willing to pay just to be able to run Sensorly. If I could figure out how to do it for sub-$100 that would maybe be worth it to me.

I don't think having all of Denver done by late spring is realistic at this point. I'm going to take a SWAG that a full LTE launch for Denver is more like fall or winter. I'm basing that on two things. One, Sprint will almost certainly make some kind of announcement that it's coming when it gets close and I don't think they have announced anything for Denver officially yet. And two, the fiber build I mentioned before is going to continue through the summer. I suspect that official LTE support won't come until after that build is done. But of course we are clearly going to see some actual LTE activations before then. The question of course being how many and how fast. And that I have no real insight to.

Cool, thanks for the info. I do drive I-70 headed east a fair amount but my plan has (in theory) unlimited roaming. It sounds like things will work pretty much the same for me when I'm out that way, just the carrier display will change.

Did anybody else see this? I know this mainly affects western Kansas but it hits Colorado some too. Are they just throwing in the towel in these areas? Or is it part of the iDen turndown? Or did these towers get sold to somebody else? It seems a little disconcerting for that much of Sprint's network to be just going away, even if it is sparsely populated. http://support.sprint.com/support/article/Learn_more_about_network_changes_coming_to_portions_of_Kansas_and_Oklahoma/case-gz982789-20111212-190208/?ECID=vanity:coveragechange

I'm not privy to any inside information, but I would hope that they would proceed in parallel with the NV upgrades and the fiber build. It's different contractors and I would think there would be few if any dependencies between them. My contract isn't up till January so I'm a ways away from getting an LTE phone. Hopefully the fiber installs will speed 3G before then. I strongly suspect a lot of the towers around here have pretty sad backhaul currently.

Hi folks! I've been lurking for a bit on this thread but figured I should go ahead and sign up. The info I'll add to the mix is that it appears Sprint is working on fiber optic builds to their cell sites along the front range. That's going to take time (most of the summer I'm guessing) but once it's done it should really help the performance of the system. If you know of local Sprint towers in your area that you're tracking you should look them up on this map and see if there is anything going to it. Make sure 'Fiber - Under Construction' layer is selected. http://www.zayo.com/interactive-network-map