AcctDeleted_Merlin

Sadly, not this year. On a side note, it looks like I may be on-call for Christmas fixes. You guys keep the complaints to a minimum, m'kay?

To elaborate on what this means... Basically, the network that the NV sites connect to is complete and is being beefed up with bandwidth. This will allow for the Denver area clusters to start coming online as they are connected/tested/BS. Now we wait for news on the NV switches. The network ring connects to the various switches and the switches send it out from there to the other switches in other states. Lets start an analogy. The sites are your fingers. The network ring is your torso. The switch is your brain. What's missing? Your arm, aka the backhaul. The last mile of fiber to a site. Some fingers already have arms. Some torsos are connected to brains. But as of right now, everyone has a torso and that torso is being built up until it has a damn six-pack of abs ( 10GB/Second at a time :-] ). BTW, Chicago is live with this same system and they are getting 45-60Mbps down. Hold on to your butts.

No, your network is not connected to the Denver area network.

ABQ?

The primary network that controls the throughput for the sites is now complete. Hold on to your butts. It's coming.

They could have been on for testing and are now off until the full network goes live.

The NV towers cant talk to the legacy site in the area. Thus you will run into hard disconnects and low signal because your phone can only connect to one of the two networks (NV or Legacy) at a time.

I want to tell you the answer... I really do. Patience, young grasshopper.

The tower is not deactivated and is running 1900LTE. But there is no point in firing up one 800LTE card when there wont be a network to back it up. It may also be in the testing phase.

85 miles outside of denver, and is currently deactivated but powered up on a full 4g-fiber site. First one I have seen.

800 LTE card spotted in the wild. ;-]

Welcome, the short answer is "I don't know". But I have personally seen some of the sites in that area and most have been upgraded to NV equipment. So, my guess is 3-6 months.

Like I said earlier. Sprint is the ONLY network that chose not to retrofit their network for LTE. Hench why they are late to the game. Sprint chose to build a whole NEW network, while also keeping the old one alive. This has huge implications for the future as we eventually move to "5g" (remember that 2500 spectrum, wink). All the other guys will have to do this same process or they will probably be severely limited.

8am is when the network is slammed. Keep in mind that you are not just competing for tower-phone bandwidth, you are competing with tower-network bandwidth. In a way you are competing with the entire metro area for bandwidth. 8am is when everyone wakes up on the weekend and checks the internet. This is the REAL upgrade of NetVision. LTE is handy for Tower-Phone bandwidth, but the real upgrade is in the network ring that connects them all. Which is just about done :-)

Is this the 8am that usually has a flood of cars on the highway all using voice lines? Every site could use an upgrade. I believe that is the plan? right?

Unlikely, the switch over is not done on site. But the site may have been down for some other reason. Thank you for your kind words. The only way I am even comfortable sharing what I know is because it is unofficial. The people on here are some of the best eyes/ears Sprint could ask for. They are actively seeking and sharing information about a behind schedule project. (BTW blame Samsung). As for your question, see Craig's response below. see Craig's response below I'm hearing more concrete rumors of a lot of LTE going active in 3 months, with the rest going active in 6. This is due to the communication barrier between the ALU and Samsung cabs. It has to come up almost all at once or it will be a damn nightmare. Ohh, you mean a shopping mall next to an interstate highway 10 days before christmas, running off 3 T1 lines, isn't as fast as your home internet because all the channels were packed with voice calls? I bet parking was just as fast. :-)

Most carriers use contract work at points. The extent to which the other carries use it is a mystery to me. I do have insight into what is happening but systemic leadership issues prevent me from expressing it properly. ;]

I wish I had a better answer for you. But at the end of the day it's your money and phone lines. Sprint is last to the LTE game and that is a bit unfortunate. You are certainly not alone in being frustrated by what the retail side employees have said. I hear people all the time with almost the exact same story about promises not kept. Sprint never has, and still has not set a date as to when LTE goes live. With so many contracts downwind and different contractors it would be impossible until the reports come back that the work is complete. Hell, Sprint doesn't even manage their own network, that's all a contract. I try to hit up the larger sprint stores and pick their brains about it but they are all clueless. If only it were a problem of "boots on the ground". It's not. There are only so many crews trained, there are only so many supply distributors, and only so many capped budget-hours to work with. That's the unfortunate fact of contract work, you can't control it after the contract is issued. Sprint contracts out to the vendor, the vendor contracts out to the distributor and to the crews. The crews say work is completed, Sprint contracts out to Ericsson to verify, Ericsson says BS, Sprint sends out corrections to the vendor. The damn chain keeps going and going. There is nothing that any one person, or even one company can do. I'm sorry that an underpaid, commission salesperson at a retail store sold you on a bad promise that was never in writing. Just like a used car salesmen, they will do and say what the have to say to get a sale because their rent payment depends on it. And $6000 is nothing sort of a cars worth of money. I wish people would start seeing it that way.

The thing is, it wont work correctly everywhere. There will be tough length of time as all the coverage gaps are located, as equipment experiences it's first real load test, and as the techs get used to the equipment. This is a huge jump in tech. The legacy equipment was pretty simple and most of the time a quick reset or hardware swap was able to fix problems. The new stuff is all IP fixes. Very little on site. There is a damn steep learning curve for it.

I really wish I (or anyone else) knew this info. We really are at the mercy of the backhaul on this one. But once it's all wired up they flip the switch within days. I honestly think all the Denver area will come online within a couple weeks of each other but they may be waiting until all the clusters are ready to start that wave. I wish I had better news. "Finished with the job" is kind of bad way to think of it. The job never gets fully finished. There are always sites down, improvements to be made, tickets to track down. The maintenance will be more software and networking side (hopefully) and less hardware related (as it is with the legacy equipment). Maybe someday I will share the story of the site that had a literal meltdown in the heat. It never stops. The only difference between sprint and verizon, once the NV is full live, is only the resources that get put into troubleshooting the network.

You obviously have no idea how difficult this project is. Let me put this into one simple sentence that might help you figure it out. Every single piece of equipment Sprint was using for their network 6 months ago is being replaced and will be operational in about 3 months. Think about that for a second. Every antenna, every cabinet, every cable, 95+% of their switch tech, ... everything. All of this while attempting to keep the existing maintenance nightmare of a network running at the same time. I know in some fantasyland of yours it only involves a switch, but you're wrong. Plain wrong. They don't owe you a phone, they owe you a network, and over the course of a furious paced 9 months they built you a ground-up top-tier network on top of an already operational network. I want to caution everyone here about what will be happening in the next few months. These transitions are tough. Antennas will be misaligned, sites will go down, speeds will flux. This will not be the christmas morning that some think it will be when they finally do "turn it on already". Everyone I know is busting ass to get this thing online. And once it is up were are going to need people like those in the forum to help us tune it. People that know what they are talking about. People that can tell us where the dark spots are, and be patient while the chain of command confirms>assesses>plans>initiates>contracts>permits>adjusts the network.

Could have been a misprint on the map. There is only one record of a location near Hotchkiss. It's a strong one too. Stretches half way to Austin, Cedaredge, Crawford, and Paonia. Toss me some debug screenshots in PM and I can look into what might be happening

Looking at the map there isn't anything in that area. Not even a decommissioned iDen site. There could have been a change in antenna positioning, but I have no way of looking that up.

There are three sites that serve that area, none of which are on one single farmers land. It could be a coordinated effort, i guess. but still unlikely as all three sites are showing green to me, but we could have a COW (cell on wheels) out there. All three towers are pretty big locations with almost every carrier sharing a mount. If someone did knock one down then it would be pretty big news. I can't find anything about it. My BS-meter is pretty high on this story.

When?