boomerbubba

Waco has complete LTE density and would be a great area to test and get an idea of what a completed Sprint LTE network would feel like.

 

Robert via CM9 Kindle Fire using Forum Runner

Well, I can almost talk myself into this adventure. The downside is that after that exciting daytrip -- the Dr. Pepper Museum! -- I would be back in Austin with crummy 3G service. And I would have retired my current Wimax device that actually works in my office.

Meanwhile, the Austin LTE rollout seems to be slipping into September, and there is nary a live tower to play with here. (I don't believe it's birds. I suspect that Sprint and Ericsson diverted resources to Houston, DFW, etc, to fight the marketing fires caused by too-high expectations.)

I remember seeing anywhere from -90 to -98 or so when getting LTE in my office before, and my signal bars while connected to LTE would be 1-2 bars at most. As soon as it switched over to 3G the bars went back to full bars of course because my building has an internal Sprint Tower in it to get 3G coverage in the building. I am having less problems with the 3G overriding the LTE signal in here though. Now of course if I leave my office and go more toward the interior of the building the internal 3G signal overrides it but this is most likely because the 4G signal isn't penetrating the building enough. It would be nice to see if they turn on anymore LTE towers close if it can overpower our internal 3G tower in the future.

Let's hope they didn't do some really kludgy thing like convert the correct RSRP dBm reading to RSSI internally as an easy workaround to affect the threshold-fallback logic, and that side-effected the dBm and bars display.

Duplicate post

As for signal coverage. I now retain 4G in my office more than I have ever before. I used to have to have the phone pretty close to the window of my office but now I get it just having the phone laying on my desk. It says I have full bars but I am not sure the phone is actually reading the bars from the LTE connection or from my Voice connection. The reason I say that is when running speed tests I get the same speeds as I did before in my office. So it seems as if the update did something to the signal bars that might make it more inaccurate on what you are really getting signal strength wise. For instance the device info area tells me I am getting -75 to -81 signal level with 4G, but if I was getting that I would be pulling 20-25 Mbps down and I am only pulling 4-5 Mbps. So I am guessing that the signal levels in device info is from the CDMA signal for voice.

Do you recall for sure how the Settings -> About screen reported dBm before the update?

If you are right about the update changing that screen to read CDMA voice strength instead of LTE strength, then this phone may have no way to show a dBm reading for LTE. Unless some third-party developer writes as app to pull it from the Android API, which is not standardized or well documented for this purpose.

Just to be sure, maybe somebody else with a GS3 in an LTE market could do some before-and-after tests of this particular screen when applying the update.

I still wonder if Waco wouldn't be a more representative test of LTE coverage because it was designed as a Field Implementation Test area in the first place. When I compare sponsor site maps -- "completed" as of July 22 vs the total project -- a large majority of the towers in Waco seem to have been completed. (By that same comparison, for example in Houston, the towers completed were a thin fraction of the total sites.) Also several months ago there was a theoretical RF coverage map built at S4GRU using the CloudRF tools, and even then the coverage seemed pretty complete.

I have almost persuaded myself to pull the trigger on buying the GS3 early just so I could drive up to Waco and test. But I don't have any trustworthy apps that would log LTE signal and connectivity automatically for me as I traversed the area.

Via XDA,

Just passing this curiosity along.

All the listings I put up were live and accessible. What I would like to know is how I was getting the strongest signal in one location but the lte record didn't populate the tower data. Is it possible that those were not hybrid stations and that's why there was no record?

I am still not convinced that the EVO's so-called "LTE Record" screen lists anything except CDMA base stations that the device logged during the time you had an LTE connection, which may or may not have come from the same physical towers.

As for the location of the tower, you apparently are relying on the Netmonitor map screen, which does not necessarily show actual tower locations. Netmonitor is definitely mapping the lat/lon coordinates transmitted by the CDMA sector base stations, and the coordinates for each sector BSID might be offset some distance away from the tower site. It is apparent from your Netmonitor map that phenomenon is occurring here. For example, the points mapped by Netmonitor and labeled 03073 and 03074 are obviously two sectors on a tower that is actually not at either plotted location. (Most likely there is a third sector named either 03072 or 03075, which you did not happen to encounter from your location. The actual tower would be found somewhere within the triangle formed by those three points. If you were an S4GRU sponsor, you would have access to maps showing the actual locations of all the towers, so you could deduce and pinpoint where the actual tower is within that triangle.)

So I suggest that from the evidence you captured, you know that you got an LTE connection from one or more towers. But you cannot know where. There is no app known that can directly map LTE towers.

Thanks for responding I didn't know that at all

It's all right in the permissions tab shown in the Google Play Store. I could copy them here, but here is a handy link instead:

The Android ecosystem is basically set up on the premise that it will allow a lot of intrusions and just have them disclosed before an app is installed. (Unfortunately, these permissions are grouped quite loosely.) It is up to the user to protect himself or not.

May I ask what's wrong with the app?

Installing the app grants it permissions that could enable reading your phone number and those you connect to, as well as your location, and report them somewhere via an Internet connection over which you have no control. And if the widget is installed, then it runs full time as a service. I choose not to do that, although it is increasingly common as a business model to barter one's private details in exchange for the use of a "free" app. But even the paid "Pro" version has all those permissions.

The app is called "network signal info" by kaibits software.

Yeah, another of the class of apps that I don't like for privacy reasons, even the so-called "Pro" version. I realize that some people don't share my opinion, but I won't install such an app and widget.

I mentioned it on there yesterday in the flash radios thread

After I posted that comment I did find an earlier thread in the Dev subforum, which is not my usual venue to browse. The General subforums have been in disarray for a couple of days because they are trying to reorganize them by carrier as they should have done all along. (Actually the XDA mods started the GS3 subforums separated several weeks ago, then mashed everything together into a big mess and now are trying to sort everything back to separate.)

Is this a radio update or firmware update? I cant do radio update on my phone as it has been hacked. I hope not.

You need to be stock, or restore to stock, to apply updates like this.

Anyone got a download link for the firmware yet? Or could someone send the file to me when you get it? My phone isn't picking up the update yet.

Found a download link for the update.zip at XDA.

BTW, LG8 is the correct version. Sprint's original announcement erroneously called it LG4.

From what I've been told... apps like NetMonitor are not to be trusted when your trying to pin point the location of a tower.

It's a little complicated.

But then Albert Einstein reportedly said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

FYI, Sprint's original announcement got the version number wrong. The OTA update is version

L710VPLG8

Release notes are the same as previously announced

Does anyone really believe this is a significant cause of delays? I do believe they said it on the conference call. But seriously. There have been birds longer than there have been cell towers. I call shenanigans.

Can't update yet either. Says it's up to date. Maybe the update is not released yet.

Typically not all users get it immediately.

But there are bigger issues confusing everyone. Some users who have got the update say it is named LG8, Not LG4 as the announcement said. So either the update or the announcement is wrong. Sprint has been notified and is investigating

I agree that those are major, however the markets cited were Gainesville, GA, Manhattan/Junction City, KS, and Sherman-Denison, TX. These do not have the same clout as "San Antonio," "Houston," etc.

 

I like the schedule Sprint presently has and that is maintained on this site, but an uninformed party might not know what we here know. Just a thought.

Sprint is trying to get more PR mileage by announcing "cities" rather than the major markets we are tracking. Except for Baltimore, which is its own market, the minor cities announced today are part of the same markets already launched July 15.

Sherman-Denison, TX = part of DFW market

Gainesville, GA = part of Atlanta market

Manhattan/Junction City, KS = part of Kansas City market

And relative to S4GRU project projections here, I have to consider the absence of Austin from today's "end of August" list to be slippage.

Some users are now reporting that the actual update being pushed is LG8, not LG4.

Sprint may have botched the announcement

This makes me worry that Austin has slipped.

Normally XDA gets their hands on updates a few days before the release..Wonder why it wasn't leaked for early adoption.

From what I can tell, the XDA community is clueless about this. The update had been announced for about 12 hours with not even a mention there. I just started a thread there.

My device shows full bars with -125dMb signal strength while in LTE only mode. I don't have a clue what's going on.

The signal strength metrics for LTE are different. Read this primer.

Back to the topic at hand, though, I'm certainly OK with forcing an LTE connection. I'm just frustrated that a supposedly updated tower isn't letting me connect. Am I reading the maps wrong? I was under the impression that the subsciber-only maps showed live towers. Do they also show ones that are scheduled to be upgraded, but have not yet been? If so, how can I tell which are upgraded and which are not?

That depends on which map you are looking at. There are some maps for each market showing all the towers that will be converted during the life of the project, which is essentially every Sprint tower. There is a separate map, updated periodically, showing "completed" towers. Not all completed towers everywhere are live to customers, but those in Atlanta presumably are because that market has been launched.

No, they are not defined for LTE specific networks. But they may be defined for CDMA2000/LTE hybrid networks. Regardless, the EVO LTE certainly populates its LTE Record screen with SIDs, NIDs, and BSIDs.

 

AJ

I wonder what happens on AT&T LTE phones.

Since the Android API provides no LTE-specific information beyond signal strength metrics, and no LTE location or IDs at all, whatever the OEMs do under the hood is sort of a mystery. Does HTC document this "LTE Record" screen at all? I wonder if HTC is just displaying the only data that Android happens to make available from the CDMA location API. There also is a GSM location API that provides the various cell IDs, etc., defined for GSM. But there is no LTE location API defined for Android yet.

EDIT: One thing that make me suspicious that the HTC ECO is not doing anyreally deep under-the-covers OEM magic with its "LTE Record" screen is this: All that SID/NID/BSID data is also reported by Netmonitor, which is just an unrooted app using the vanilla Android APIs. And that data just comes from the CDMA location API.

I have looked for some LTE documentation that would explain in the abstract what system of IDs it even uses. Gotta believe there is some unique ID somewhere. Can you point so some document that explains that, or how hybrid networks ID their sites?

The BSIDs come from the LTE Record screen hidden inside the EVO LTE. They do indicate sites with live but not necessarily accessible LTE.

 

AJ

I thought that SID, NID and BSID are CDMA IDs, not IDs defined for LTE. (I even thought I read you saying something like that.) Are these IDs found in the LTE standard? Would an LTE-capable GSM device capture these IDs, too?