chamb

OK AJ, if the GPS signals are typically -150 RSSI, do you know what the signal levels are on a Directv or Dish satellite? Why does it take a carefully aimed dish at home to pick up those signals while a GPS can pick up a -150 with a cheapie built in antenna? Is the GPS satellite transmitting at a much higher power?

It would amaze me that the antenna in a Spectrum analyzer could pick up that strong of a signal from a satellite without a dish type antenna. I have some hands on experience in installing and aiming a directv satellite dish and I assure you, it better be aimed at the correct spot or you ain't going to get a signal good enough to use. Very hard to aim and capture the signal. If this was from one of Charlie's satellites, he was probably using a "Spot Beam" to cover a small area. I have to wonder how much power he would have to use to get a strong enough signal on the ground that you could pick it up without much trouble. You may have really stumbled into something that was previously unknown to the general public. I would not think that any of Charlie's older satellites would have been equipped to broadcast on the H Block unless Charlie had bought a satellite from another bankrupt satellite company that had previously been allowed to transmit on those frequencies. Since Charlie only recently acquired the H Block, he would not have had time to build and launch a new satellite equipped to use the H Block.

If coming from a satellite, I would think you would need a dish type antenna to be able to capture enough signal and you would have to have it pointed at he satellite. But after saying that, if you think about a mobile GPS receiver, it captures data from multiple satellites without a dish type antenna. I would also question if Charlie would have a satellite in orbit that could transmit on those H block frequencies.

Be very careful if you switch carriers in your area. I do not live there and am only repeating what somebody told me. This somebody told me that ALL the carriers seem to have bad service in your area. I may switch too if I were in your area, but I sure would research things out totally before I made a decision. DO NOT assume a sales rep in a store will be honest and tell you that they have poor coverage in your area. DO NOT assume any coverage maps are correct. Be careful or you will jump from one bad situation into another and be locked into a contract.

Your 800 signal may be coming from a site much further away too. Have you proved it is coming from the same site??

AT&T is claiming you are too far away. Does this make sense to you? Is there a neighbor that is further away with the service? If you see the AT&T technician, try to get him to explain how they have your neighborhood wired. Maybe the phone cable in front of your home comes via some crazy weird route that makes it much longer than it needs to be. You might call AT&T AGAIN and demand to know just how far away from the DSLAM your are. Demand that somebody "in the know" verify it. I have seen quite a few instances where the records were wrong. That is common. If you mess with their minds long enough, they may do something to shut you up. They may actually get off their butts and do something. AT&T may be entirely correct, but I would mess with their minds anyway.

Can you get or do you now have AT&T WIRED phone service? If so, you have half of the battle won in order to get DSL. DSL only is possible if you are within 15,000 feet of their DSLAM equipment. You may be that close since neighbors seem to be. You could be closer or further away depending on where their equipment is located. A DSLAM installation has a certain amount of "ports" for DSL. They may refuse to give you DSL just because their DSLAM is full and they do not want to upgrade it. The phone cable between your home and the DSALM may not run the shortest route. EXAMPLE, my DSLAM is 100 feet behind my home, but the cable connecting me to it is 4 blocks long. You need to pester AT&T and find out WHY you are not able to get DSL. Are you really over 15,000 feet away?? Sometime their records are wrong. Sometimes they restrict new DSL connections if their internet capacity is overloaded in the area and they just do not want to spend any money to upgrade it. Your DSLAM may be in a AT&T building or in a little box along a curb or hanging on a pole.

I doubt if anybody can give you an answer that is going to be a guarantee. I sure can not. But here is what I would expect: The site or a nearby site will get 2500 LTE. If it is the same site that gets converted to LTE, I would surely think that you would get a good signal on the LTE with Sprint's better antennas/radios. However, if they dump this site because they can place 2500 LTE on a nearby site, you could have an issue. Looks to me like your area is "high" enough to see the existing Wi-Max antennas. It may not have a good view of a nearby site even though it is very near the old Clearwire site. You need to determine if the current Clearwire site has any existing Sprint service on the same site. If Sprint & Clearwire are both on the same site currently, my best guess is that you will eventually get Sprint 2500 LTE. Another issue you may have is that the data plan you get with Sprint may burn your pocketbook . You may wind up with lesser amount of data at a higher price. Nobody wants to provide unlimited over the air home internet service at a reasonable price. You are not being unreasonable when you are stating that you are nervous about this situation. I would worry more about Sprint allowing you to have a "home internet connection" and use all the data that goes with that. You might be able to get a Sprint "Hotspot" and use a little data at home, but you would have to be very conservative on the amount of surfing you do.

Yep, that we can agree on.

OK, you verified what I THOUGHT I knew. This brings up another question. If the phone is using 2 or 3 carriers, what happens to your battery? I would ASSUME that in an idle condition, your phone would not be using any more bandwidth and would not be using any more battery. But if you were streaming something that would use CA, like a movie, wouldn't the phone be eating power to keep 2 or 3 carriers active? With a long data session, would the cell site be splitting the data between the carriers from start to finish or only when it needs to?? I do realize that for a short data burst, it might not matter much, but something like a movie might use 3 channels for quite a long time. CA could be a battery killer. If you are going to download a movie, would it use more battery power to download it quickly over 3 carriers than it does to download it slowly over one channel?

A good question here on this subject: When Sprint sets up CA, will the current bandwidth used by the older NON-CA phones be included in the CA group?? Will the older phones be competing with the new CA phones for some of the bandwidth. Sprint has enough spectrum to build a CA group that would be completely separate from the original 2.5 LTE spectrum. Will they do that?

Not Correct. You will not be able to provide any proof of this. Sprint did not ever own Embarq and they were not required to sell their local division to create Embarq. They sold off their local division because they wanted to.

Maybe Sprint is not going to buy T-Mobile, but maybe they are going to merge the networks. Dish may also be coming. This could be very big without the merger distraction. A way to go around the regulators.

OK, Speculation time. WHO is the new CEO??? This could be even bigger than we know or assume. Something happened that we do not know about.

The WSJ says they have a "Source" that claims the Sprint-Tmobile deal is not going to happen because of the steep regulator hurdles. I woudl like to see Sprint take the money and bid for adequate 600 spectrum. AND, I would bet that Charlie& Dish are coming on board now.

Shentel job posting - RF engineer -York, PA http://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/17563117 Check out the video at the bottom

If you read the above newspaper article carefully, it states they intend to cover Winchester, Va and Hagerstown, Md with 4G LTE. This might be for their own nTelos customers only. It does NOT say that Sprint Customers will be allowed to use the service. Shentel already has those areas covered for Sprint and the coverage is superior to anything NTelos would ever do. I would think that Shentel would scream very loudly if nTelos would be a competitor for the traffic in those areas.

The deal with that is that more people with more smartphones are using more data for more hours, for more things. Hopefully the addition of 800 LTE will take some of the load off of the 1900 LTE and then in the future, the 2.5 LTE should really take more of the load off the 1900 LTE.

Apparently it is not in-service yet or we would probably know about it.

I have heard that, maybe here on S4GRU, but I never could find any real proof like we have in nTelos territory. Is it operational anywhere in Sprint Corporate territory or just in nTelos Territory??

Does anybody think that DISH might be working with nTelos in an effort to run a beta test and debug the service? When the service looks ready for Prime-time, then they partner with Sprint in some way. nTelos might just be a good way to get a system in place, fix the issues, and not really tip off anybody of the long term plans with Sprint. Sprint has the 2.5 spectrum nationwide and an established network of cell sites with backhaul. They are testing with 2.5 spectrum as that is what they plan to use for a full roll-out. Sprint has the 2.5 spectrum.

My thoughts exactly. Start sharing a network. At least in some areas, both could use the same network and still continue to use their own network at least for awhile. Neither carrier should be building cell sites in low density areas. The JV should be doing that with both companies being able to use the low density sites. Share the network, the spectrum and the expenses.

Notice how the site says "available in PORTIONS of these areas". Does not mean full coverage in those areas.

Maybe, and maybe not. Other people are reporting problems with Wi-Fi calling, so it may be that problems exist at the VOIP switch site. When the Airaves were first placed in service years ago, the service crashed quite often. Some Airaves were bad, some were not. The problems were sometimes at the Airave switching equipment and it may have been hardware or software.

Johnathan, Most of your post is absolutely true. But the comment about adding T-mobile being easy to add via computer is arguable. It just is not going to be that easy. If they trash the old t-mobile network completely and just give them CDMA phones, it might be easy, but I doubt that it would go down that way. There will be some havoc, we just do not know exactly where or what it will be yet. One thing for sure, in the Shentel footprint, the T-mobile customers would get a tremendous boost in coverage and overall cell service that was much much better. Shentel has almost 100% of their footprint covered with excellent voice and LTE coverage. T-Mobile has horrible service in the same area.