ingenium

This is B26. Sprint really needs to boot everyone off B26, except those who cannot connect to any other band.

 

Using Tapatalk on Nexus 6

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

Not sure what you mean by small cells? Aside from a few DAS deployments, all Clear sites are macro builds. When Sprint acquired Clear, the WiMax to TD-LTE conversions were stopped, so many sites remain WiMax only until Sprint converts them to Sprint equipment.

 

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.

I have seen this in the Bay Area and it was really disappointing because the Clear site is still active as WiMax only, no more LTE but provided much better service. I hope they will convert the site and bring it back online.

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

Thank you both - I am still learning how to find my away around, particularly when it comes to locating the maps that are mentioned. Actually it is pretty clearly marked, but thank god I bookmarked the NV Sites Complete the first time, because for some reason I keep missing it. Is there a Clearwire map or way to identify Clearwire sites on one of the other maps?

 

 

Ingenium, see you back on the SF Bay Market Thread

lilotimz, look forward to learning more about Nevada

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

Haven't counted the Clearwire site count in the Bay area so it best ask the people in that area but yes. Bay area is also going to get some needed added density since their Clearwire market is also Huawei equipment that needs to be replaced.

 

Optimize 800, add new macro sites via replacing old Clear sites (easiest) and outdoor small cells (verizon is going extremely heavy on this). Right now they lack conistency of coverage and I do not imagine any improvements until they "optimize'" band 26 whenever Sprint engineers feel like doing so. Right now Band 26 is about the same as Band 25 so it's only acting as a coverage band.

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

Also to add onto my earlier post, I just randomly remembered that I've connected to B41 in Alameda just in a few places, Nob Hill near the Fruitvale Bridge and The Beanery in Alameda Marketplace on Park St (it's a cafe in a building with a bunch of other small business & a health food store)

 

I'm just guessing from experience but I don't believe there are if many B41 sites in Alameda mostly because B25/26 do such a great job because most people here seem to have every carrier but Sprint.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone 6 using Crapatalk

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

Thanks for your helpful detailed observations.

 

 

 

I am curious what size blocks does Sprint currently have for B25 and B26 in the Bay Area. My understanding is B26 is 5 x 5.

 

Both B25 and B26 are 5x5 FDD. There isn't enough spectrum for a second B25 carrier or a 10x10 carrier.

 

I have heard service in the "flats" of Berkeley/Emeryville/El Cerito/Albany has always been spotty with Sprint. Getting permits in Berkeley is challenging but doable. In fact one concern I have had since NV was announced is that I have seen very few Sprint permit applications listed, disclaimer - I have not checked this in over a year. There is vocal opposition to cell towers, but I think the majority of residents are fed up with restricted service in a community where people work in higher education, science, and technology. I assume there are a few members/visitors to this forum who reside or work in Berkeley and I would welcome hearing more first hand accounts of any progress or black holes that you have noticed recently. It looks like Sprint has done a good job around UC Berkeley, I would be interested if people have noticed improvements and are happy with capacity, speeds, and coverage.

 

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.

 

 

I would also like to hear from anyone who has recent experiences using BART particularly in San Francisco and the East Bay. Nothing tests wireless capacity on BART like a ten car train in the tube during rush hour!

 

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.

 

 

When you say it is saturated, are you getting dropped calls, unable to make calls, or slow data?

Where there is B41 how well is it holding up indoors?

 

 

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.

I have not seen much activity here recently and was wondering what kind of experience people have been having in the Bay Area now, in particular San Francisco, Marin, and the East Bay (Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley). Are speeds and coverage improving and becoming more consistent when you are on the move?

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

Has the Airave been updated to support 800Mhz?

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

Most international nations run on different bands that US / NA does not support and thus subsequently devices destined for US are not designed or tested for like LTE bands 3/8/18/19/28/33/34/39/40 etc. In those areas Sprint will access the much more common WCDMA Band 2/4/5 networks which most devices worldwide support.

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

I hate to say it but I agree when critics make fun of Sprint for confusing the hell out of things. So I just want to understand a few things about this Sprint Open World thing. It sounds like from what I read that it is an additional add on that you need to enable onto your account. Also does this mean that unlimited free 2G data is gone in European/Asian countries if you have both add ons enabled? I just don't know why Sprint doesn't just make things simple with a single add-on. Can someone clarify the ins and outs of this program.

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

No IPv6 here.

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

AT&T and T-Mobile LTE are not using IPV6 for me.

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

When I drop to 3g this is what I get.

 

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=5751491E40D9FD7F!11345&authkey=!ALgraVRY0UB9WtA&v=3&ithint=photo%2cpng

 

I can view my APNs ,I am connected to APN2 LTE internet (n.ispsn)

 

My market is South Jersey and Philly Metro

​

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

Well my GS6 edge show IPv6

 

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=5751491E40D9FD7F!11344&authkey=!AFSuSaJzNU0c_Z0&ithint=folder%2c

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'm wasn't insinuating that that's not a problem. I was simply stating that RootMetrics indicates that reliability isn't the problem as much as speeds are. Testing of their network indicates that the area where Sprint is lacking is average speeds. In select markets this isn't the case and in those markets we see that Sprint is doing insanely well from a business standpoint. In a day and age where data is the focus of many carriers attention, you have to keep up.

 

As much as I hate the speed test contest, we have to acknowledge that it's a thing that many people factor into their purchase. A lot of people just want to see "My network is faster than yours." and it's not just a niche crowd anymore.

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

Yeah. You just add more antennas and radios.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5

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

 

Sent from my Nexus 6

I'm not terribly familiar with it, but some had asked for intents to trigger certain events (connecting to certain sites/bands/networks/etc.) Perhaps execute an event when on B41, or whatever you like. I just have to educate myself on how to do it.

 

-Mike

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

i thought wifi had to be off to do a prl update

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

Thanks guys! I don't recall ever hearing about the 39/3A/3B second carrier (or I did, and totally failed to make note of it). I will put that in the next update.

 

 

-Mike

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

EVO 4G release in 2010 is when I recall it really starting to get bad.

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

Looking at the engineering screen.

 

 

 

Sent from my Nexus 6

Just had it happen on my Nexus 6, I think. It's hard to tell, since EVDO doesn't show the carrier. But 1x was Verizon at -90 and EVDO was -102. Is there a way to verify who the EVDO carrier is?

 

Sent from my Nexus 6