ingenium
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Posts posted by ingenium
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I've also heard that Nokia's NR equipment isn't very good, at least compared to the competition. And that it's buggy. The 2.5 equipment Sprint was using for LTE+NR had a several known bugs. Some European providers have already torn out Nokia NR equipment and replaced it with other vendors for that reason.Interesting! Word is within the T-Mo engineering area, is Ericsson is the way to go... better tech than Nokia.
T-Mobile moving NYC's midband 5G signal from Nokia to Ericsson
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It works now. It can take up to 3 weeks to enable it though after changing over, but usually it's within a week. It used to be a fully manually process, with someone having to turn it on, but it seems more automated now.I just got an email from Sprint (an ad) trying to get me to plug my Magic Box into my home internet service. I did this once before and lost VoLTE. Seemed VoLTE only worked with LTE relay. There's no way I'm putting this on my home network if I'm going to lose VoLTE.
Anyone have any updates or other info suggesting that this has been enabled? (VoLTE using Ethernet or WiFi backhaul, that is?)
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You will lose VoLTE if your internet cuts out. Used take a few days to get it back (again, maybe a manual process?). But when I tested this weekend I got it back within an hour.
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All magic boxes have a wifi chip. It was just disabled typically and not usable for backhaul except in the gold. I think until the gold it was 2.4 GHz 802.11g only. Some really crappy chip that was likely only used for out of band access.Likely means older Magic Boxes are soon to be junk. I will have to check my MB screen menus.Sent from my Pixel 4 XL using Tapatalk
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Interesting. I'm somewhat surprised they don't just move the magic box to B25 or B2 (on T-Mobile). I'm assuming this means they went to refarm the magic box earfcn, and they can't move magic boxes to the macro earfcn while it's relaying B41.Just got a text from Sprint. Seems like they want to cut off LTE backhaul soon.
Sprint: A quick & easy update. Reconnect your Sprint Magic Box to your home internet for a better network. http://s.sprint.com/tz9Evsv FreeMsg.
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For Verizon and T-Mobile, I just have unactivated SIMs in them and they work fine.
How do you get your Verizon SIM to connect to LTE without active service? Mine will only connect to CDMA.
Thank you all for the advice! Luckily for me, I am covered as far as SIMs go; I was just looking for suggestions on a cheap android. I'm able to get a really good deal on a Pixel 2 - do NSG (is some other form of band locking)/SCP/Cellmapper run well on those phones?Pixel 2 can do NSG, but Pixels require a licensed/pay copy of NSG to band lock. Other phones supposedly don't. Google disables Qualcomm diagnostic mode, so NSG has to jump through some hoops to get it working. On the 4 they don't even include the driver for it, and you have to flash the userdebug vendor image every month. Pixels are fantastic for NSG and logging, except if you need to band lock and don't have a license. No other way to lock bands.
A lot of people in the NSG community really like one plus phones. They support a lot of bands, and play well with NSG. But I'm not sure how good Sprint support is with their older models (ie CDMA).
If band locking isn't super important to you, you could get a Pixel 3a since they're on sale. They support dual SIM, so you can log on two networks at once with Cellmapper. SCP doesn't support dual SIM yet, and seems to report data for the active data SIM. Neighbors will show both SIMs though usually.
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You can login to the web version and manually placed them (or move them if someone put it in the wrong place). Definitely worth doing once you're 100% certain of a site's location.I've found some that are flat out wrong in cellmapper, I'm about 98% sure of it. In fact, I think the tower was being upgraded over the past couple weeks (I'm sure the lovely weather has slowed them.) I'm mostly outside of, or just inside of I-270, northeast Columbus and beyond, most of the time. I'm new to tower locating and identifying, so it's a learning process for me!
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You can roam on HSPA now. It will use it if there's no Sprint CDMA and no Sprint and T-Mobile LTE (or if you force it with something like NSG). But T-mobile is shutting down HSPA at the end of 2021 I believe. They haven't added it to any of their new sites in a while. They really want to refarm the spectrum.I'd assume HSPA would be further down the road, not currently though, correct?
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Yes, you need VoLTE on. Alternatively, if it's connected to HSPA, it would use that for calls and you'd have data at the same time.Got a text today that "Sprint has joined T-Mobile. You now have access to expanded coverage on the T-Mobile Network! Also enjoy simultaneous talk and data - no action required by you"
Are we supposed to get actual Data while using voice? Or do we have to switch on VOLTE calls under settings?
I see T-Mobile LTE bands, but no data available while making a call. Thanks all!
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That must be a Samsung thing then. Or an issue with your wifi. It's been rock solid on Pixels.WiFi calling has never been good, I've missed a lot of calls due to it. I just leave it disabled at this point.
For years back in the day, Samsung phones had an issue where wifi would go into a power save mode and would miss IPv6 RA packets. The result was that the IPv6 address would expire, and the phone would just drop all the connections silently and not reestablish them unless you turned the screen on. This caused notifications to stop working on IPv6 capable networks. I'm pretty sure it eventually got fixed, but it's possible there's something similar that's happening with wifi calling on Samsung devices.
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Yeah VoLTE took forever on Airave 4s, but it's definitely working now. Supposedly it was enabled months ago, but not necessarily for existing devices (only new ones). I had to factory reset mine to get it back in the queue, but after 2.5 weeks it got it. My Magic Box with wired backhaul, on the other hand, got it only 3 days after a factory reset.I'm trying to switch over to the Airave 4 now that the've enable VoLTE on them. That should fix this problem. The only reason I got the Pebble over the AR4 is because VoLTE wasn't enable on it yet.
It seems that a lot of femtos setup before VoLTE launched never got put back in the queue (particularly femtos using WiFi or Ethernet backhaul), hence the necessary factory reset.
I'm not sure if an Airave 4 would offer substantial coverage improvement over the Pebble, other than having CDMA as a fallback. If you need to cover a larger area, you can use both actually. They should handoff to one another with VoLTE, just keep them sufficiently far apart to minimize interference. And you'll probably have to tell Sprint it's for use at a different address, but they won't actually check where it's deployed.
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Yeah, agreed, it's pretty ridiculous, but that's typical Sprint for you. I doubt T-mobile will put any work into fixing things like this, since they will want to get rid of B41 femtos to refarm the spectrum. Plus they're moving people to the T-Mobile network anyway. I imagine their CellSpot will work better with VoLTE, with the caveat that it doesn't have as good of range as Sprint femtos (at least the magic box). And/or they'll release a 5G version eventually.I just figured it couldn't hurt for it to have a fresh reboot every week at 4 am on Sunday while not in use. I don't know if it particularly NEEDS that but the point is that any type of power/internet failure knocks the damn VoLTE out for 2-3 weeks which is ridiculous. I'll disable it for now and see if the router becomes unstable.
But either way, we likely won't see any changes or improvements to Sprint femtos going forward. If you have a UPS, it's worth putting the Pebble, your router, and modem on it. It's certainly nice to have working internet for a while when the power goes out, and then you won't lose VoLTE either.
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I also realized my router is set to reboot once a week which knocks the connection out. I'm wondering if that is causing this Pebble to never activate VoLTE.
Yeah that would definitely do it. It keeps getting pushed to the back of the queue.
The guy I spoke to was more in engineering than tech support. He's helped me with a few other issues in the past, so I trust what he says.
Why do you have your router set to reboot weekly? If you have to do that for it to be stable, perhaps look for a new/better router. Mine is at 337 days of uptime. I only reboot when there's an update.
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The VoLTE thing is very annoying. From my conversation with a high level support tech, VoLTE is MANUALLY enabled on all femtocells. So after a reset or initial power up, it goes into a queue, and some engineer or support person starts going through the queue and toggling it on if certain conditions are met. I've had it take as little as 3 days, and as long as 2.5 weeks. It's pretty shocking that they don't have a better way to do this....So I got the Pebble from Sprint, I'm waiting for the damn VoLTE to enable. I harassed Sprint and they said it is a limitation of the device (which they still can't explain why) and waiting is the only option. They also told me every time there is a power failure the wait for it to enable begins again.... really? Does anyone know how it works and why there is a 2-3 week lead up to VoLTE enabling? So now my voice calls drop down to 1x and I can't receive MMS when I'm on a call. No problem I thought, I'll just switch to wifi calling for now and I can still get MMS over LTE while I'm on a call. Not so fast. For some damn reason wifi calling doesn't work on my SM-G970U1 (unlocked s10e) when I'm connected to the Pebble. If I turn airplane mode on, wifi calling pops right up. If I unplug the pebble, wifi calling pops right up. That leads one to believe the Pebble is preventing wifi calling from activating for some reason. However, my dad's LG V20 has absolutely no issue using wifi calling while connected to the Pebble and can therefore receive MMS just fine. Do you have any idea what in the hell could be causing this? Is this some whack setting on the s10e which I'm not seeing? Phone has the latest updates, 911 is updated, I did PRL and profile updates. I'm stumped....UPDATE: So I found the answer in the wifi-calling menus and googling that took me to a post here. Apparently starting in April of 2020, Sprint decided it knows what is best for you so it sets calling over the network to preferred and only if signal is too weak will it default to wifi calling. There is no visible option in the phone to change that setting. I had to download Samsung Band app to set it to prefer wifi and bam.... now it is enabled. I'd still like to know WTF the Pebble is doing with VoLTE though.
My guess is it's something to do with integration into the nearby network, so that macro handoffs are smooth. I've heard that after initially getting enabled on a femto, that future enablings are much faster (1 day or so), but I have mine on battery backups and don't really want to test it... You'd still think that they'd be able to automate this though...
Until a couple months ago, only LTE relay magic boxes got VoLTE. Anything using wired or wifi backhaul didn't. When I reached out to the above tech about this, he said it should work, and then 3 days later I got it enabled. Either he fixed the bug, or it was incredibly coincidental, after many months of not having VoLTE enabled.
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There are some other bugs with neighbors. B66 at times will show as B3 (a non-US band). At least it's consistent though, so when you see it, you know what band it's supposed to be. With B66 at least, it's something to do with the earfcn being really high. I believe Dave found another band being reported as B7 in neighbors, which also isn't a US band, though they do use it in Canada.Ahhhh, A couple of times I saw t-mobile band 41 in my neighbor sites and I knew that was wrong. It was coming from a known t-mobile site but the site only has band 2 & 12. Had me guessing. I saw this on a Galaxy S9. When it shows this, it does not have a valid receive level. Shows some level like (-190325643) Yes weird.
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You should be able to negotiate that down. I pay $78 for gigabit fios, not as a new customer.Any idea/guesses on on pricing for fixed wireless home offerings from T-Mobile?
I currently spend $100/mo for Verizon Fios. (300mbps)
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It only differs with CA combos really. For example, I've never seen B25+66 CA, and many devices likely aren't certified for it (are any?). Same with B25+71, B25+12, etc. I also don't think T-mobile broadcasts mfbi B25 very often for that very reason. B66 on the other hand is different. Older devices may not support b66, especially in CA, so that is still mfbi b4 when possible, but generally b4 can be referred to as B66 since all the CA combos are generally well supported.I keep forgetting they are subsets. I’ll say 25/66 going forward lol
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I have read that older phones such as my Note 9 will have to be discarded as it doesn't get the right frequencies... Is this true?
The Note 9 supports T-mobile frequencies. Everything except B71. The T-mobile Note 9 didn't have it either though. So it'll work just fine, except it won't have access to that band. Almost all phones on Sprint (at least sold in the last 3+ years) support most T-mobile bands. Some may not support VoLTE though, at least with Sprint firmware. But they are capable of it and worst case can be moved to the T-Mobile firmware. They can all make T-mobile 3G calls though.
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It's non ionizing. Worst case it would heat things up a bit. It's basically like a bright light.....and delayed onset cancer. Just kidding.....probably.
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There was a Sprint site mounted literally right outside of my dorm freshman year, right next to my window. So maybe 1-2 feet from my bed (or however thick the concrete wall was). Needless to say, I had a good signal [emoji23]I came across this site watching a YouTube video and looked it up on the sponsor maps and Google Maps. Is it safe to have people that close to these antennas? Especially the life guards and attendants that stay up there for hours at a time? This looks to be a full marco site as the site ID has an XC identifier and its listed as having all of the Sprint technologies active. It might just be a very low power site.
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That speed is likely for a 40 MHz n41 carrier. That's the starting point. In many markets they can deploy bigger carriers than that without shutting off any B41. As LTE is refarmed to LTE, they can also do bigger carrier sizes, or have multiple N41 carriers that are aggregated.
I figured New T-Mobile was sandbagging us with the 600 mbps download estimation. Don’t get me wrong, that’s plenty of speed as most fiber optic WiFi speeds are between 200-500 mbps. Just thought N41 could potentially average 800+ mbps download with full 5G capacity.
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You can change it back to be wifi preferred if you want. At least you can on non-Samsung devices. It should be under the wifi calling settings.Answered my own question I guess with the FAQ section for wifi calling...
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I'm pretty sure iPhone 6 uses eCSFB.Thanks. They all have the iPhone 6. Is there any way to fix the potential eCSFB issue on the A4?
So basically, the signal comes in on LTE telling the phone to switch to CDMA to take the call. And for whatever reason, either that signal is failing, or it can't connect to the Airave CDMA fast enough, or can't find it, or it tries to use a macro CDMA signal instead. There are a lot of different possible reasons for why incoming calls are failing. Honestly, eCSFB has always been a bit flakey in my experience with missing calls, especially in lower signal situations.
Nothing you can do about it, other than maybe contact Airave support. I'm not sure if the 4 is actually having eCSFB issues, I just know that the 3 does. At least on my old one, they broke something in the last update before marking it end of life. It seriously screwed up any phone in range that uses eCSFB or VoLTE (only SRLTE devices worked), even if that phone was on a macro. You had to be out of range for about 15 min for the phone to get fixed, and then a flood of texts would come in or send. Very bizarre issue that it affected devices nearby but not connected to it.
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So family members of mine, who live in a condo, have had an Airave 4 since July 2019. They got it since there are a few dead spots in their condo where the macro site cannot reach (in the deepest portion of the condo, away from the exterior walls, but overall it's a small portion of the condo). Within the past few days, the A4 has been unusable as incoming calls go straight to voicemail (although outgoing calls work). They tried unplugging and plugging back in the A4, which did not help. They are now keeping the A4 unplugged and just using the marco site. Wondering if anyone else has seen this issue and if there are any fixes? The bigger question is, what is Sprint doing with A4's these days? Are they still sending them out and is it possible to get a replacement?
What phones do they have? If they're older, it could be an eCSFB issue (Airave 3 got this issue when it went EOL). Do they have VoLTE enabled?
I believe Sprint is still sending them out. Everything works fine on mine. They recently (in last couple months) enabled VoLTE on the Airave 4, so they're still supported, at least until July. Who knows after that.
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T-mobile plans to shutdown GSM on 12/31/20, and shutdown 3G/HSPA on 12/31/21 I believe. So as of 2022, calls will only be possible on VoLTE/VoNR.As far as the iPhone 6 goes, I doubt they'll force anyone to get a new iPhone. The iPhone 6 supports band 2 and 4. There are plenty of iPhone 6 still out in the wild on T-Mobile.
I just don't see how they can justify forcing Sprint users out of the iPhone 6, but leave current T-Mobile users on them. It wouldn't make sense or be fair.
Does the iPhone 6 support VoLTE on T-Mobile? If so, it should be easy for them to move Sprint users over as T-mobile customers, and then they'd get VoLTE. Worst case it would require a SIM swap. If it doesn't support VoLTE on T-Mobile now, then anyone without a VoLTE capable phone (Sprint or T-mobile) will need new phones come 2022. At least if they want to have calls.
2022 will be the end for people with legacy phones. AT&T is shutting down their 3G then as well. There will be no 3G networks left, LTE and NR only. I wonder how they'll handle the regulations that a phone can use any network that it sees for 911 calls, if those networks are all VoLTE only. Roaming will also be interesting, especially for foreign visitors whose home networks may not support VoLTE.
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Official Tmobile-Sprint merger discussion thread
in T-Mobile Merger/5G NR Deployment
Posted
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