BillNickless

Just got back into town this morning. Confirmed LTE over by Costco and the Columbia Center Mall, plus downtown Richland. Download speeds with Sensorly started out at about 8 megabits/second but stabilized right at 5. I wonder whether Sprint has implemented per-flow queuing tricks to throttle us would-be bandwidth hogs? :-)

The tower up by Battelle only gets me about 1.5 megabits/second at most. Seems to me that tower is still using an old-style T1 back haul circuit, which could explain why they haven't yet turned on 4G.

So here's what I've done while waiting for Sprint LTE coverage in the Tri-Cities on my Motorola Photon Q slider: Buy a couple of prepaid WiFi hotspots from Wal-Mart (T-Mobile and the Verizon $100 prepaid Novatel MiFi). The T-Mobile device comes with a 5GB "starter" plan; for $15 to Verizon you get 250MB for up to a week, or $60 gets you 3GB for up to a month. Drive around Tri-Cities testing throughput using Sensorly (Facebook album), confirming that Verizon coverage wins hands down over both T-Mobile 4G and Sprint 3G. Discover that Talkatone works great for Google Voice phone calls and SMS texts on my iPad through either the T-Mobile and Verizon hotspots. Ask my wife and parents for a used Verizon Droid 4 as my birthday present. Move the SIM from the Novatel MiFi hotspot to the Verizon-locked Droid 4. The Droid 4 registers itself with Verizon just fine for data sessions but can't do phone calls or SMS texts (sort of as expected), nor will it act as a hotspot. Install CyanogenMod 10.1 for Droid 4. With this ROM the Droid 4 happily acts as a hot spot using the MiFi SIM. Install Talkatone on the Droid 4. Using the data service it sends and receives both calls and SMS. Bottom line -- for a couple of hundred dollars in equipment ($100 for the prepaid Novatel MiFi plus about $100 for the used Droid 4 off eBay) and $60/month in prepaid Verizon service I have full 4G LTE service in the Tri-Cities. If I use up 3 Gigabytes of data service before the end of the month I simply prepay early for the following month. If/when Sprint gets LTE service working here in Tri-Cities (assuming performance and coverage is acceptable) I can simply stop prepaying the monthly $60 to Verizon; no early termination fee or arguing with a Verizon sales droid about why I want to cancel my service. Either way I end up with a second perfectly functional WiFi smartphone for home while my "away phone" is charging.

Last Friday the Richland WA site I posted about (above on 22 July) had trucks around it again. This time they were putting a conduit under the street working with a Frontier crew. New backhaul maybe?