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 M Hotel site appeared to have NV improvements starting in about August.  I was getting speedtest.net results as high as 2.8 to 3.2MB - is that even possible with 3G?  Most of the results were consistently about 2.5.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Discover that Talkatone works great for Google Voice phone calls and SMS texts on my iPad through either the T-Mobile and Verizon hotspots.
4. Ask my wife and parents for a used Verizon Droid 4 as my birthday present.
5. 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.
6. Install CyanogenMod 10.1 for Droid 4.  With this ROM the Droid 4 happily acts as a hot spot using the MiFi SIM.
7. 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?

Hey coug, last week I saw someone up on a cherry picker working on the antennas at this location (link to Google Street View).  You can't quite see it in the picture, but one of the fiber junction boxes on the fence around the base is labeled "Sprint".