ingenium

It appears these are the other sectors for the example site in the post above https://goo.gl/maps/ZjX3X and https://goo.gl/maps/UtQTn I don't see an RRU or any cabinets anywhere. Here's a different site showing the panel head on https://goo.gl/maps/8lH2f. I'm not sure how they actually tie into backhaul. That's why I assumed these were small cells, since they're different from regular Clearwire sites. I wonder how difficult it will be for Sprint to convert them to B41 after the wimax shutdown.

Agreed. I'm always on B26 or B41. B26 is completely saturated most of the time, but B25 is wide open when I'm able to connect to it. B25 in some of the areas I frequent is under -100 dBm but it puts me on B26 anyway. For my home site, I reported it enough on Sprint Zone that I think they manually tweaked the load balancing and I'll be on B25 much more often now, but that doesn't happen on any other site. My guess is that they're now idling devices on B26 to help battery life, and it's supposed to hand up to B25 when you pass a threshold of data usage in a given period of time. Or at least that's what I've observed sometimes. But in many cases it doesn't actually work that way. Sent from my Nexus 6

San Francisco has a ton of telephone pole mounted Clearwire panels that I'm assuming are small cells. Here's an example of one: https://goo.gl/maps/5nb22 If you look at the map in the first post here http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/4674-clearwire-td-lte-2600-wimaxexpedience-maps/ you'll see a lot of green sites in Noe Valley and the Castro where native Sprint service is awful, no LTE at all. There are also a bunch slightly further south. Those are all small cells like the one in the street view image above.

Do you know which site this was or where it's located? Sent from my Nexus 6

I believe they're Sprint voicemail notifications. They come in as SMS, but usually the phone parses it and hides it from the user. Sent from my Nexus 6

There is a nationwide Clearwire map, but it's Premier only. It shows all sites, including sites that never got LTE. Sent from my Nexus 6

SF Bay market has 301 Clear sites (some are co-located so won't be new builds). There are 491 if you count what I assume are small cells that are wimax only. These numbers also include the San Jose market because Clearwire didn't distinguish between SF and San Jose. Sent from my Nexus 6

B41 is actually currently on at least 28% of Sprint sites in the SF Market. If you're looking at just SF and the East Bay it's much higher, I would say 50-65%. About 10% have a second B41 carrier. Plus all the Clear sites (~300 total), which Oakland has a lot of and SF to some extent. Clear really fills out Oakland so that B41 is pretty prevalent, but they never expanded north into Berkeley. If you want details on exactly which sites have B41 and where the Clear sites are, you can check the Premier thread in my signature. Sent from my Nexus 6

Both B25 and B26 are 5x5 FDD. There isn't enough spectrum for a second B25 carrier or a 10x10 carrier. You're right, the "flats" do need more sites. The sites that exist are also pretty low. Some are on top of 2 story buildings, whereas the surrounding buildings are all higher, so coverage is only a couple blocks for that site. An example is the site near Ashby BART that's attached to the stop of a house (in an enclosure). It's only possible to pick it up within 1 block of the site. The site just off Stanford and Market is the same (doesn't even reach to the Adeline, Stanford, MLK intersection). Interestingly, I'll sometimes connect to sites in the Oakland hills or even high elevation sites in Daly City from Emeryville, Berkeley, and Richmond. The BART DAS in Oakland hasn't been upgraded yet, so it's EVDO or 1x only for now while underground. When you're above ground though it works. Half of the SF BART DAS has been upgraded (south of Glenn Park or so), so you'll get a good usable B25 signal south of there. North of there the DAS doesn't have LTE yet. By saturated, I'm referring to data. There are too many users on it, and the speed is sub megabit with very high latency, or connections just time out all together. Basically what 3G was like before NV 1.0 started. Calls work fine. B41 seems to be good indoors if I can pick it up outdoors. But the indoor locations I've been (in the east bay anyway) that have B41 have been pretty close to the site (~1-2 blocks away), so I would expect it to be good inside. The other locations I frequent don't have B41 on the local sites. Again though, if the site has B41 then a majority of the traffic will be on that band, freeing up B25 and B26 to provide coverage instead of capacity.

In my experience, it's been pretty good if the local sites have B41, even if you're on B25 or B26 since B41 handles a majority of the load. But when there's no B41 then the other bands are pretty much saturated. An example would be parts of Emeryville (Bay Street gets B41, but the rest doesn't really. Near Pixar it's mostly unusable during the day). Oakland is pretty well covered in B41, and Berkeley is getting there. Speeds near Ashby BART are poor, but once you go a little further north and cross Ashby Ave they improve. It generally works pretty well around the university, but I haven't checked since school started again. San Francisco is a crap shoot. Some areas are great, but others (like the Castro) are a black hole. The last time I was traveling down Market it was fairly slow and B25 and 26 seemed saturated. It's improving as more sites get B41 though. Sent from my Nexus 6

It has a beacon on 800mhz to tell devices to connect on 1900mhz. That being said, your phone will still sometimes bounce off onto the nearby tower anyway even if there's no LTE signal, I assume because the tower supports eHRPD unlike the airave. Sent from my Nexus 6

Do you think devices which support international LTE bands, like the Nexus 6 and I assume the iPhone 6, will be able to use them while roaming instead of WCDMA? Sent from my Nexus 6

From the looks of it, I think you have to remove the unlimited 2G add on to be able to add this one. So it's either one or the other, you can't have both active on one line at the same time. Sent from my Nexus 6

Has anyone else noticed poor performance starting around this weekend? My phone started hanging on to B26 all the time, and it's completely saturated and unusable, even at 11pm tonight. I can sometimes get it to hand up but it'll drop back to B26 almost immediately (with a signal of -80 dBm) or go to 3G (which is equally unusable). This is in areas with a strong B25 and B41 signal. Last night at 1am I was right next to a site with B41 but it wouldn't connect to anything except B26, and nothing would load. I'm wondering if Sprint tweaked the load balancing settings, or if it's just a localized problem in the East Bay? The reason I think it may be a load balancing issue is that if I start something bandwidth intensive (such as a speed test), I can force it to hand up to B25 or B41 halfway through before it drops back to B26. So the network seems to be trying to idle me on B26. However, for things that aren't bandwidth intensive and are more latency sensitive (casual browsing, playing a realtime multiplayer game, loading email, basically anything that isn't a large download or video streaming), it doesn't trigger the handup and things are slow or even start timing out.

So I suspect that it can be "forced" by editing the APN. But I'm not sure if that is necessarily a good thing. It'll mean anything using IPv6 (Google for example) will need to re-establish a connection upon dropping to 3G. If Google Play Services, for example, doesn't know it lost IPv6, then it could delay push notifications for several minutes until the heartbeat times out. Sent from my Nexus 6

T-Mobile has their APN set to use IPv6 by default on newer devices. You can change the APN and it'll work (set it to IPv6, not IPv4/IPv6). Some things may be faster since it won't have to go through their carrier grade NAT. Sent from my Nexus 6

OK, so you lose IPv6 on 3G, which was what I suspected. If you tap on that APN, it should list a bunch of stuff (it's greyed out so you can't edit it), one of which is APN protocol. Does it say IPv4, IPv6, or IPv4/IPv6 in that field? Sent from my Nexus 6

Interesting, my Nexus 6 is still IPv4 only. I wonder if IPv6 would work if I edited the APN... Unfortunately 5.1.1 took away the ability to view or edit the APN with a Sprint SIM inserted (though I could probably edit the db manually). Does the S6 edge let you view the APN that's being used? I'm also curious what happens if you drop to 3G. Sent from my Nexus 6

I think part of it is because when people see lower speeds, they know it will just get slower over time as more people change carriers or usage increases. Or they think that the network may become unusable during peak hours or during events. With a higher speed, there's more room for growth. Plus things are noticeably laggier and slower at 1-2Mbit versus 5-6 even. Once it drops below 1 Mbit things stop working well (at least for me). Above 25 and most people likely won't be able to tell the difference though. Sent from my Nexus 6

They use a different channel/frequency correct? Or are they positioned so they don't overlap? Or something else? Sent from my Nexus 6

An intent to enable and disable the background service would be useful (this can be a simple broadcast receiver though and doesn't need anything specific to Tasker. Tasker can broadcast a custom intent). But I assume you mean a plugin so Tasker can act on updates from the SCP, such as the band changing. I've written a Tasker plugin before if you need any help with the Tasker portion of it. The documentation isn't that great, but it's not difficult once you get past that. Sent from my Nexus 6

Nope I've done it on wifi. I was going to a newer version so I definitely know it worked. It's too bad there isn't a way to manually write a PRL like on some other phones. Sent from my Nexus 6

In case you haven't seen, Samsung second B41 carrier uses 03, 04, 05. In SF we've found a few sites that instead use 09, 0A, 0B, but I suspect this was a mistake by a deployment crew, perhaps brought in from LA where I think the Clear second carrier uses those. Sent from my Nexus 6

For me it was February 2011. It was like a switch was flipped. In January everything was fine. Then I was out of the country for a month and when I came back data was completely unusable in the area of Pittsburgh I lived. I was just passing through my old neighborhood last week, and there was strong B41 everywhere. I was surprised how much it had improved since I was there a few months ago. I rarely dropped B41 everywhere I went in Pittsburgh and the immediate suburbs, much better than San Francisco and Oakland currently. Sent from my Nexus 6

Sent from my Nexus 6