boomerbubba

This internal memo is consistent with language in that Sprint press release three days ago: Which is something approaching the soft-launch strategy that several commenters here have been suggesting. BTW, I agree that the headline on this thread needs editing. (Nice cateh, ahecht.) If the original poster doesn't make the fix, perhaps a mod could do so.

The BSIDs represent CDMA connections. LTE connections do not have BSIDs. Even while the phone has an LTE connection for data, is also will maintain some CDMA connection for voice. The Android does detect LTE as the type of data connection, while also detecting the BSID of the concurrent CDMA connection. These unrelated values are made available in the Android API used by various thrird-party apps. Several apps, apparently including Netmapper, conflate these two runrelated facts into a combined record or report that gives the erroneous impression that they know where the LTE connection is coming from. They do not. The LTE connection might be colocated on the same tower with the live CDMA connection, or it might be on a different tower altogether. This is even more likely today, when only a subset of the towers have LTE at all, but they all have CDMA.

Here is a sponsor map of all the towers in the project, which essentially are all the currrent Sprint towers. All will be upgraded when the project is complete. If your 3G signal strength (which is different from speed) is decent at a given location today, you likely will get LTE there. There are other sponsor maps showing scheduled tower upgrades and completed tower upgrades in the sponsor forums. But these maps don't show much realistic about Austin right now because the deployment start was delayed here relative to the original schedule.

Robert is usually pretty responsive about upgrading donor accounts, although he does have a day job. I live northwest of the Arboretum, and work near the Capitol. My 3G speeds at home lately vary between 250 Kbps and about 1.1 Mbps. At work, they are abysmally slow, often in the 50-100 Kbps range or even worse -- probably choked by backhaul. Once the new network is running, the key issue for me is whether I will get strong enough signal strength at my desk to get LTE service, and if not whether the new backhaul will make 3G acceptable. Although we have confirmed physical upgrade work at several locations, and Sprint has announce that deployment is underway, no one has yet detected LTE in Austin itself. If Spring follows its previous pattern, LTE will be blocked until they think there is enough coverage to make a minimal launch.

It is a question of when. The Network Vision LTE rollout was delayed in Austin, but at least deployment work has now begun in the field. The current best guess in S4GRU's Running List schedule is a November 2012 launch and February 2013 completion. That is only an unofficial projection. Welcome to S4GRU, BTW. If you are serious about tracking this stuff, the next step is to become a sponsor.

There is one last complexity. BSIDs and their associated coordinates are squawked by the CDMA base stations, not LTE radios themselves. So Netmapper (and all similar apps) are only able to log the CDMA base stations detected while the phone has an LTE connection. These CDMA base stations may or may not be on the same tower where the concurrent LTE connection is coming from. There is no app that can map LTE towers directly. This is an inherent limitation of the Android telephony API that the apps use.

I don't think there is a difference at all. This is merely an artifact of the inconsistent Android telephony API.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that. But any slippage on Sprint's part until today was likely due to the lack of an LTE iPhone.

Probably. Or maybe in a new Unicorns and Rainbows Forum.

Depending on your settings in the app, you might need to explicitly upload your report to the Sensorly mothership. I've never run the app in passive mode. Maybe that is fully automatic. Maddeningly for me, the app seems to provide no way for me to isolate my route locally. It certainly does not let be export a log for myself.

Yes, I'm sure the introduction of the new iPhone model will make Sprint's network rollout go faster.

I know it is plenty more than enough work. That is my point. I am not criticizing Robert, and I understand that there is really one main actor behind the curtain. I am suggesting that others' ideas for even more ambitious, structured threads for each market, heaping even more work on him, may be misplaced when the existing structure can't be maintained consistently on schedule.

Hmm. Dedicated, official threads per market in the Network forum. That's a different proposition from what I thought the OP was suggesting, which was dedicated forums per market. Such threads do exist in the sponsor forums, and I do like them. But I have to think the downside is that it would be a significant work on Robert's part and a lot of activist work on the part of the mods to police all that, if the intent is to prevent fragmented and duplicative new threads by the general membership from cropping up. That would take a lot more activist Whack-a-Mole policing than what you guys are doing now. (For example, the moderators generally don't even move to enforce clear existing rules against posting privileged sponsor-level detail in the general forums.) So it is mostly a question of what level of disciplinary editing work you want to take on. I'm agnostic on that, because I have no skin in the game (nor do I wish to). EDIT: I have to remind myself that there also already are dedicated market threads in the main Network forum, too, and that the highly visible Running List thead links to them. But it obviously is too labor-intensive already for Robert and the staff to keep those threads updated as facts on the ground change. These threads mostly retain their original boilerplate. Even the Running List thread itself -- which is probably the most frequently linked thread in the external blogosphere -- is not kept up to date because the manual work is apparently not feasible on a timely basis. I don't mean this as a criticism, just an observation about reality. I think the S4GRU staff should think twice about any ambitious new structured format requiring even more work.

Thanks. I had never zoomed in far enough to see the towers. This confirms what I suspected about a couple of towers in my own city.

Do you know of a map of Clearwiire's Wimax towers? AFAIK we don't have one.

Even allowing for the large negative bias of online forums, which attract the ranters, whiners and haters disproportionately, I have to wonder if this press release was a smart marketing move after all. We here know there was not much substantive news to motivate it, all PR. But mostly, by listing these 100 cities large and small, Sprint seems to have pissed off everybody who lives in the other thousands of cities that were not listed. In the context of a customer base that is justifiably frustrated with the legacy network, it doesn't take much to light a firestorm.

I like things the way they are. Sponsors do have one dedicated thread per market in the Interactive S4GRU Maps Forum, and Premier Sponsors have dedicated market threads in their forum. Each forum has convenient meta threads indexed with links to those geography-specific threads. In fact, I think sponsors should be using these threads more because they sometimes post privileged details from Sponsor maps in the other general forums. In the general Network forum, there are ad hoc threads about specific areas created by members themselves on demand. I would not like to see them fragmented further. It would make it even more difficult to use apps such as Forum Runner to keep up. In practice, I like reading the threads that don't even pertain to my own parochial geographic area, because there often is rich detail in comments, especially by core members, that is educational and generally applicable.

My understanding is that completed status means that an upgraded site has been accepted by Sprint from the OEM contractor, but the contractor's responsibility does not include the new backhaul. Also, the Completed status may reflect 4G upgrades, but that does not necessarily mean that both 4G and 3G upgrades are complete. (There may be additional milestones related to backhaul and 4G/3G status on the Premier Sponsor maps.) Completed status on the Sponsor-level maps also does not necessarily mean that the upgraded site is live to customers.

Yeah, I get the impression that Sensorly's user base, at least among Sprint LTE users who actually run the app and submit data, is not that large. I don't think there was anything showing in Waco until Robert visited the city last week and drove all over collecting Sensorly data.

Sheesh. I just read the massively overhyped story about this in Engadget, which said the press release shows that Sprint "is nearly ready to blanket up to 100 markets with the high-speed data tech in the near future." Then I spent about 10 minutes browsing the comments there. I am now a lot dumber than before.

Look at the bright side, everyone. According to the 2010 Census, there are 19,516 incorporated places in the United States. So we can look forward to many more press releases like this one. Of course, residents of the 19,416 metropolises that were not mentioned today feel slighted. But Christmas shopping season is coming before you know it.

Why would you expect it to be? S4GRU's projected schedule as of today still shows Seattle as a Second Round market with an Anticipated Launch in May 2013.

Interestingly, this press release seems to indicate that there will be more of a soft-launch in the deployment areas, with less blockage of LTE signals: That is good news.

This kind of detail really belongs in the Sponsor forums.

No, that link will only show you a small subset of Sprint towers that have been scheduled for "band-aid" maintenance upgrades of the legacy network. As a sponsor, you have access to maps of virtually all Sprint towers in the interactive project maps, since the NV sites are essentially all the current Sprint sites. Look at those maps at S4GRU.