chamb

According to the court injunction, WIMAX must stay active in York & Harrisburg until end of March. This may or may not be hampering the activation of B-41 LTE in those cities.

I do not know what "Crowd Sourced" means exactly, However, if you ever get to see the signal strength maps that Sprint generates for their technical use, you will be amazed. They know exactly where they have signal strength issues. They also can tell how each site is performing and how each carrier on the site is performing. They really do not need crowd sourced info. Hopefully they will not cut the employees that look at this type of info and rely on some guy yelling that Sprint needs to expand into his rural hunting cabin. I mapped a whole county on Sensory over a year ago when we only had band 25 LTE. Tried to go back and do it again when Band 26 went active. The weak spots showing when I did the band 25 mapping are still there even though Band 26 should make the area dark purple. Using Sensorly to decide where to install a small relay cell would be like driving without headlights in the dark and looking out through your rear window. It might be ok to look at Neilson, Rootmetrics and Sensorly, but they better only use the data as a starting point and verify it all.

Every company that goes this route soon finds out it does not work. The vendor will hire anybody and everybody and none of then will have a clue. You will get transferred around, lied to, and whatever it takes to just cover up your issue. Sprint even tried it in the past and it failed. It will fail again.

Shentel's cell sites are about to get totally buried. The I-81 corridor from Virginia, through West Virginia, Maryland and Central Pennsylvania is getting hit right now. 20-30 inches predicted. I am in the middle of it and have 15 gallons of gasoline for a generator & big snow blower. I have some charged external power packs for the Android phones too. It is snowing like crazy and I am in a nice warm house and intend to staying there for about 36 hours.

If the microwave system is designed/engineered/installed properly, this can be minimized and be almost non-existent. I personally operated a 6 Gig microwave system that never failed for 15 years. This was with nasty rain/snow/ice storms in each of the years. The system did get a little close to the edge at times, but it was designed to have enough margin so it would continue to work in horrible conditions, and it did.

If you have half decent Band 25, it could be possible that your Band 26 might not be much better. The band 26 might be optimized to fill in a dark hole that is more important than your particular home. Band 26 can also be optimized to reach out further than the band 25 will.

If one vendor has it ready, do they wait until the other vendors have proven software simply to be sure they are going to be able to provide software that is 100% equal in quality and performance? Apparently one vendor that does not have their act together can hold up the whole process? Second Question, will it be necessary to activate all sites in a general area with 3x CA at the same time or can one site have 2x CA and a neighboring site have 3x CA? Would those two neighboring sites play together nice?

Does anybody know where the Core Switch is located for the new LTE that nTelos has been activating? Would that core equipment be decommissioned and all the nTelos sites be rerouted onto the existing Shentel Core? OR, would maintaining the existing nTelos Core be sensible for redundancy?

If Band 25 (1900) as working for you with a decent signal, you would not be likely to see Band 26 if it was there.

Just yesterday morning, I walked into a restaurant for breakfast. Laid my Galaxy S-5 on the table with SCP booted on screen. Had LTE 800 showing at -115. Ran a speed test. Had 2.5 mbps. Upload was a disaster at .04Mbps. Ordered breakfast and all of the sudden, SCP beeped and I had CDMA 800 1X at -88. LTE never returned until I walked out into the parking lot. Had a -108 in the parking lot and as I drove away, I had LTE on 1900 at -105

EC/IO The EC/IO is a measure of the quality/cleanliness of the signal from the tower to the modem and indicates the signal-to-noise ratio (the ratio of the received/good energy to the interference/bad energy). It is measured in decibels (dB). In a perfect world, where there is no true interference, the interference level is equal to the noise level resulting in an EC/IO = 0 dB. Once the EC/IO is above -5.0 dB, your connection is going to suffer. There are several factors that can contribute to a higher EC/IO value, including florescent lighting, electric motors, equipment, power supplies, bad/poor cabling, trees, hills, buildings, walls, shorted connectors, inaccurate antenna alignment, wrong antenna polarization, congestion at the tower, etc http://www.laroccasolutions.com/training/78-rsrp-and-rsrq-measurement-in-lte

Yes, when the fiber backhaul was activated and the microwave dish was removed at the site, the performance was much better and no B-41 was activated. Maybe they had inadequate capacity near the other end of the microwave?? Fiber bqckhaul surely improved the site. Ping time went from 323 ms to 40 ms.

My local Shentel site is almost ready to go live with Band 41. But it recently got a big boost when a mini-microwave system was replaced by a fiber ring. When on the microwave, the site was almost unusable during heavy traffic periods. Since the switch to fiber backhaul, I can pull 5 Mbps on either Band 25 at a -111 level or on band 26 at a -102 level from 3 miles away. The equipment for Band 41 is on site and I expect it to go live in the next week.

I agree with this 100%. The situation I had in Chambersburg was not enough time and once I backed away from the cell site, I had blockage by the buildings in the city. I need more time to find the spot with a little elevation and not blocked by the downtown buildings.

Yes, Shentel is installing a fiber ring through Franklin, Adams, York, Cumberland, Dauphin counties. Lots of money being spent to establish it. I have no info as to the completion date but it may be active in some areas. Actually, single digits and low teens is not bad if B-41 is not yet active.

Yes, mostly under the antennas and I have seen slow speed tests even on other bands standing under the antennas. I quite often see better speed tests if I get back a 100-1000 feet or so and get a little height. Seems like the antennas are built to NOT throw the signal downward. When I mentioned seeing approximately the same range on 2500 as was on 1900, keep in mind that this was not really proven beyond a reasonable doubt. I accidentally stumbled onto this new B-41 and really was not able to spend much time checking this out. It would have been interesting to find a spot where 2500 was degrading and walk into a building. I did not have the time to test things real well. What happened to me just a few times was: when the B-41 degraded to about a -112, the phone would switch to 1900. Sometimes the 1900 was from the same site and sometimes from a neighbor. This 1900 level was approximately the same level and it may stick on 1900 depending on which direction I was moving. Sometimes it soon moved to 800. But this is all one guy doing a quickie test and it may work differently elsewhere depending on site density and if the neighbor sites are equipped with B-41. In this case, no neighbors are B-41 active.

I would think that the number of people calling in to complain about poor service would have dropped considerably over the last year due to all the network upgrades that have been done. The number of employees at the call centers are probably dropping every day.

Found B-41 in Downtown Chambersburg, Pa today. In the 200 block of Lincoln Way East (Rte 30) I was able to get up to the fence at the cell site. Two photos and two screen captures attached. This site is a "hub" site and it now has an on site generator powered by natural gas. That one should run forever during a power outage. Good move Shentel. Speedtest yielded only 7 Mbps. Seemed a little slow. I might guess that backhaul is not yet correct. This site was running 3- 5X5 carriers before this B-41 was activated and it was slowing down. While the B-41 did seem to be handling all the traffic for the entire downtown, I was surprised to see the 7 Mbps speed. I found no other nearby sites with B-41. Maybe the 1900 and 800 carriers were barely loaded, but I was not able to really access them to find out. No matter what I done, I was locked on B-41. I only have a Galaxy S-5 and was not able to prove if there was a second B-41 carrier. I was locked on the primary B-41 carrier all the time. It seemed to me that the 2500 carrier had about the same range as the 1900 carrier. When I ventured away from the site, as the 2500 weakened and dropped, the 1900 carrier would be about the same level and it would either then hand off to another 1900 site or the 800 carrier.

Once Shentel gets total control of nTelos, the coverage will look like regular Sprint Coverage. This should happen very early in 2016. This will include 1X, 3G, and LTE. It will take awhile until Shentel gets the coverage installed that is needed to bring the area up to standards expected.

I would doubt that you would connect to any LTE roaming as long as you have Sprint EVDO available. Sprint would probably not want to have you roaming at all if they have a signal available to you. Band priority probably means nothing either. Sprint is available and you phone will use it.

Might be a good reason to NEVER buy another Samsung Galaxy.

I personally was not suggesting that it SHOULD be done. HOWEVER, I was suggesting that somehow it COULD be done and therefore it WOULD be done.

I am thinking that a good IT person or half a technician will be able to put more than 3 devices on Karma. Connect some type of router or wi-fi repeater/extender after you establish the primary Internet connection on Karma. Maybe they have some way of detecting more than 3 devices, but I would think you could isolate them somehow that Karma could not see what was using the data.

Cell sites die every day all over the country. A Massachusetts judge would not bother me too much if I was in California at a bad cell site. It could take a few hours to fix the site or it could take weeks if repair parts no longer exist.

The original contract may have been signed in Massachusetts.