caspar347

Just found another GMO>Full build conversion today myself. With mini macros. Very exciting considering word on GMOs this time last year was "they might be replaced sometime in the far future if someone stumbles upon enough cash to fund it but they aren't part of any current plan".

^^^ can corroborate. I've seen a couple of permits to do this around Charlotte. (At least one was canceled but still it's progress.)

Thanks. T-Mobile picked up B, C, and D here.

I'm looking at the FCC PRS. Is there any easy way to see who got which blocks here or elsewhere yet?

Trip's experience matches up with what I've seen travelling in the Southeast. It's as if all towers outside of high traffic areas are still in 2014 pre-optimization low power mode. Sometimes I think it's got something to do with ALU gear being sub-par.

Hell hath frozen over.

Heh, I knew you'd say something along those lines. PEBKAC, right?

Sorry, that was poorly worded. There was an instance where my searches for PCS licenses in Mecklenburg County NC (only search criteria being frequency range 1930-2000 and the state-county restriction) consistently didn't turn up WQCS421. So really my beef is with the search function. But point understood.

Yeah as far as I can tell from the ULS (which, knowing the ULS, may well be inaccurate or incomplete eh as AJ points out on the next page the database itself is accurate and I probably just don't know how to search) Sprint only has PCS D and G in PR. So a 5x5 of LTE and 3 CDMA carriers. Which isn't even enough for a lot of rural small-medium towns in the continental US these days. They could definitely use the spectrum. It looks like Open Mobile has PCS C1 (lucky coincidence I guess) covering both BTAs, so that would mean the possibility of a 10x10 with the adjacent G block and an additional CDMA carrier tacked on the bottom, bringing their operating total to 1x800, 4 PCS CDMA carriers, a 10x10 in PCS, and whatever they've got in B41, which isn't bad all things considered. Oh and I didn't check 700 so anything there is bonus if Sprint decides to actually deploy it. But if I were them I'd trade it with AT&T or T-Mobile for more PCS. Edit: reading the PR thread it's B13, and given Sprint's lack of 800 LTE there maybe they should consider adding B13 to devices going forward and keeping it up? Eh. I don't see any AWS under PRWireless or Open Mobile.

If you try to get it fixed or refunded please keep us posted on what LG/Google does. I'm really worried that my replacement one is gonna bootloop.

Hmm. I think my map might just be showing any MSA that the cable co offers service in. So yes your map is more accurate.

This is the combined company's combined coax footprint. I wish these cable/wireless mergers would stop for the sake of competition, but I will say that TWC subscriber-access "public" wifi covers virtually every public Sprint indoor deadzone in my immediate area and it would be sweet if Sprint subs got access to that wifi. Edit: and here's a population density map since that gives some more meaning to the data.

Yep. Associate general counsel from '01 to '03. He wants to "take a weed whacker" to net neutrality and FCC consumer protection policy in general. (His words, not mine. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/fcc-to-be-led-by-ajit-pai-staunch-opponent-of-consumer-protection-rules/) I'm not really worried about wireless since aside from 700 open access requirements and spectrum caps the regulations there are already pretty barebones. (And it can be argued that between the big four there's meaningful competition.) But for wired (where I, in suburban south Charlotte, 17th most populated city in the nation, have only one option that meets the current definition of broadband) on the other hand... Edit: from the article:

Eh. Reddit's always like that. IME there's always a group of people that act like that no matter the topic and no matter the subreddit.

I'm not outraged. I just thought it might be interesting to see what the data looked like when zero-indexed so I threw together a graph. The scaling doesn't matter as long as it's consistent and shows the entire data range. (4 was just the Google Sheets default.) It's T-Mobile's marketing department's job to skew stuff like this in their favor.

Notice the data spread differences.

Yeah that's some pretty creative scaling there. Actual graphs looks like this. T-Mobile is not, in fact, 10x faster than sprint. All I did was 0-align the data.

The reason they're not doing carriers 4+ on all sites is backhaul cost. 8T8Rs can do all 6 with just software updates.

As far as I know they're both right. Tim is saying that additional carriers will be deployed this year and David is saying that they will not be deployed in the same "every single site gets it" manner that carriers 1-3 have been. Which lines up with the most recent plans I've heard about; going forward the "default" number of carriers for all sites will be 3, but individual sites will get more (up to 6 total) if they are overloaded. There will be no mass nationwide rollout of 4th+ carriers unless plans change. But they are testing 4th carrier for overloaded sites that need it.

Frankly I'm really surprised nobody has tried to call CA "5G" yet. Doing so wouldn't be all that different from calling wide-carrier HSPA "4G". Both cases are just existing standard tech but with more spectrum.

I'm actually not sure about that (the 26 antenna ports don't look hooked up) but that's hard to tell from the pictures. But yeah those are 8T8Rs.

I'm in an ALU/Nokia-A market so I'm not great at recognizing non-ALU 8T8Rs, but I'm pretty sure the lower right antenna in the first image is an 8T8R.

A normal B25+26 and 8T8R install?

Oh, and it's super important to keep in mind that (IIRC, Tim please correct me if I'm wrong) 8T8Rs can't do more than 3xCA. So you won't see individual speeds higher than what we've seen so far. ...until future software updates happen.

8T8Rs support up to 6 carriers. They just have to do testing for each additional carrier. Sprint has more than enough spectrum for 6 Band 41 carriers in most of the top 50 markets IIRC. But this does NOT mean 4x or 5x or 6xCA. That won't happen for a while, as 8T8Rs can't do 4x/5x/6xCA without current software. But unless plans have changed recently, they're going to stop at 3 carriers for most sites and add more as needed site-by-site. i.e. 3 carriers will be the default and they can do up to 6 if the site is heavily used (middle of a city, single site covering an airport or mall, etc). They won't do 6 on all sites because the backhaul is twice as expensive and the vast majority of sites will never need 400+gbps of capacity. 3 carriers offer ~200gbps max per sector and they can always go back and add carriers as needed. As far as timeline goes, I kinda doubt they can test another 3 carriers across 3 sets of B41 gear in one year if the last 3 take as long as the first 3.