caspar347

Yeah, all of the test locations happened to be in areas with great service for all four carriers (i.e. very close to towers) with one exception. I'm actually kind of surprised they had Sprint LTE at the Myers Park location. The locations kinda make me think they specifically looked for towers to test under since the testing is for speed only, but they didn't verify that all four were on all tested towers. But regardless, this shows how ahead of the curve Sprint is on spectrum and equipment to utilize that spectrum. Awesome stuff!

Oh. I just assumed that $0 was the permanent "web price" and it was $10 in-store. That's fine then.

Yeah the more consolidation on SIMs, the better. I just ordered two (the SIM in my brother's 5X is flaky and I like having spares) and while it asked for a CC it didn't charge anything. (I used an empty but still valid prepaid Visa.) It gave me the option to order up to ten just from the product page. That's definitely gonna be abused. They could make it like 1 cent or something. Didn't AT&T do that at some point?

Thank goodness. It's about damn time they cut down on the SIM compatibility matrix cluster.

Oh. That's awesome. Didn't know that. Post edited. But my point still stands. One omni sector with two B41 carriers at the same height as a three-sector macro with 3+ B41 carriers per sector doesn't make a lot of sense.

Yeah, there comes a point where I'd be worried about the small cell covering more people than the serving macro sector at that height. Here in the hilly suburbs where I'm at most of the Sprint macro installs sit right around 90 feet AGL (usually on the lowest lease level with the other three between 100 and 150 feet ) and an oddly placed small cell at that height could easily end up covering just as many or more people as a macro sector if it's on a hilltop above a recently developed area with no nearby macro. And my understanding is these are just outputting a single B41 carrier compared to the 3+ a macro sector would be outputting. (2xCA; See nexgencpu's post below) Thus I doubt 70ft poles will be common. Edit: and with ODAS/traditional small cells it's just one or two band 25 carriers coming out of an omni so that would make even less sense. But I don't think we've ever seen a "traditional" small cell anywhere near that tall.

Just wanna make sure it's clear since the context is on the private side of this forum: my post and the quotes therein earlier in this thread were about 27-foot metal all-cables-hidden ODAS nodes (that's the height given by the company, not an estimate by me), not 70-foot Mobilitie small cells. Is Mobilitie really trying to use 70-foot poles everywhere or is this an isolated example?

Based on the neighborhood meeting I went to a few weeks ago, the main concerns are: 1. "Service already works, why the hell do you need more towers?" 2. "Can't you just put it next to the freeway half a mile away?" (The residents didn't realize the interstate is already lined with macro sites) 3. "It's my property! Why the hell are you allowed to touch MY property!?" (Apparently people around here assume if they paid more than 700k for a property that means it's automatically exempt from utility work of any kind) And 4. "PROPERTY VALUES!!1!11ONE" (I totally understand your concerns, but this is inevitable. If you don't let one small cell company do it, another one will come along and sue for access. And win. And do a far poorer job than the company that originally offered.)

We have a couple hundred Clear sites in Charlotte. A bit more than a hundred of those are collocated or redundant with Sprint sites. The remaining (a bit under a hundred) are non-redundant and would fill 3G gaps. Out of those (a bit under a hundred) non-redundant sites, only a couple dozen are dual-mode. The rest are WiMax only and are now sitting dormant. I haven't seen a conversion yet. And we need them dearly.

The panels that really need to get switched out are the WiMax-only panels in prime infill locations.

That's great, and posting a profit is absolutely critical for them at this point, but network stagnation is kinda the reason they got into this mess (network wise) in the first place. I just hope they keep this in mind and get really aggressive after profit is achieved.

Well at least now they've got the FCC breathing down their necks. Probably better for all involved parties to ensure more transparency.

That's what I've never understood about the LTE optimization issues. If all of the airlinks that cover an area are gonna be congested, why not at least put everyone on the most efficient airlink possible? I guess that's just Sprint trying to keep user perception of LTE as high as possible.

B block is 15 FDD. 30 total. Still, not too much wiggle room. Especially with that kind of population density.

Just to clarify, Sprint is using both B25 and B41 small cells. They are two separate types of small cells, but both are used. I assume the type used depends on whether the area has any B25 LTE to start with. Band 41 small cells will definitely go a very long way towards solving capacity problems.

I totally forgot about the legacy issues. Which is weird since I'm in a damned Motorola legacy market. The whole "no eHRPD (and I think eCSFB was a problem too) until literally the entire market is NV3G-complete" fiasco, that was wild.

I think it's about equipment failure risk spreading. (Asset diversity now that I think about it.) The regions were probably auctioned.

I know we'd have no way of hearing about it, but I hope they have implemented some deadlines at the middle management level with some serious penalties. Particularly in the network department.

Yeah, my brother's came with one (ordered in April). Must be a new thing because I haven't seen anybody mention it anywhere else on the internet.

From the article: This is concerning. I totally understand the eyesore concerns. But CCI/Verizon has already grabbed so many prime locations that this rule, if adopted by other cities, could really muck up competition. And isn't there something in the telecom act of '96 that says you can't deny permits on the basis of "another carrier already offers service here"? Not sure if that applies here since these will be mostly for capacity, but it could probably be argued in a court if the city explicitly states something along the lines of "it's first-come-first-served" since small cells AFAIK are not co-locatable. Which brings me to another point. Carriers do need to figure something out for eyesore and redundancy concerns. (Of course this wouldn't be an issue with shared infrastructure which would pretty much solve all of these problems, but I don't want to get into politics.) Stackable pole antennas. Shared antennas. Something. This problem is just gonna get bigger.

Are carrier-agnostic ODASs a thing yet? Just looking at the hardware it looks like the Crown systems could be in theory, but I don't know anything about the back-end.

I know this is a risky tangent to go off on, but for me it's 4 Verizon, 3 AT&T, and 4 T-Mobile. It's been over a year on known Sprint permits. I guess I'm not the only one.

Hmm. Yeah, I'd bet it's pretty hard to get permits approved when you're not applying for them in the first place. Just a thought. On another note, it's nice to see more subscribers.

Tl;dr the Verizon LTE (gen2 XT1528) model can be GSM-enabled if you have access to a computer even after the 5.1 patched update. Story time: My friend's unlocked Moto X broke so he decided he wanted a Moto E to tide him over until he could get the X fixed. The Cricket model you can purchase in a retail store is listed at $30 but after fees and stuff its about $60. So I told him I could take a shot at convincing the Verizon Prepaid model to take a Cricket SIM. (Verizon phones are supposed to be unlocked, right?) So we grab one from Walmart for $35 and then we realize we need a nano to micro adapter. We track one of those down and then I get to work on the radio side of things. Of note, this is model XT1528; not the Boost model. Some old articles on the internet indicate you just have to run a couple shell commands over adb to restore the GSM/LTE option to the settings menu and everything should work from there. We run the commands a couple times and nothing happens. Then I started to realize all of these articles were written back when the phone shipped with 5.0. Apparently Verizon patched the menu in the 5.1 update. I found another old forum post on XDA by someone in the same situation who gave instructions for flashing the old modem. A couple hours later (all of the stock firmware repos only have the 5.1 and 5.1.1 files) I found someone hosting the original 5.0 files. The fastboot modem flash worked, and the commands enabled the LTE/GSM option! I'm still not sure how Verizon was able to manipulate a UI feature (admittedly radio-related) with a modem update, but the rollback worked so I'm not gonna complain. The model supports 2 and 4 (among others) but all I've seen it connect to so far is AWS. My point in posting is that the Verizon model is the cheapest way to get a Moto E at the moment and it can be made to accept any SIM if you're willing to put an hour into it. Working with this thing made me wish even more that Sprint carried it on postpaid. For normal tasks it's just as good as my 5X and it would make a great backup. And it's cheap enough that I wouldn't be worried about losing it.

Eyyyyy 10 blocks in Charlotte. Nice.