JWMaloney

Tim, any info on the Ericsson RRUS 82 B41 that is starting to be deployed in place of the Nokia FZHJ?

The only B41 site in Slidell is the one southeast of I-10 and Old Spanish Trail which was confirmed in February 2015.

They're suing because they've been investing heavily in growing their MPLS business and in getting their SD-WAN services launched, both of which depend heavily on competitive services offered through the regulations that were just rolled back. It's a major loss for them.

"It was working a lot better -- their cell signal was working a lot better -- and they asked, you know, what did we do? And we said 'Well, do you see the clock we put in?'"

Most of the FCC ASR applications I've seen for Mobilitie so far are for 120 ft poles, at least in my region

Unfortunately they're still 3G only. Notice they used a SISO configuration.

Most of them are eventually supposed to be replaced with full builds as budget allows

Yes, they've been using it on COWs/COLTs in rural areas to reduce roaming.

I don't know why people keep saying this. They're not working with me.

Bonus points if anyone can get some good shots of the CCI Bi-Sector antennas Verizon uses in their six-sector setup.

To clarify, people with previous Airave models were routinely instructed by Sprint Care to disable LTE on their devices so that they could connect to the Airave explicitly. Otherwise they ran the risk of not receiving incoming calls. The new model doesn't just provide an LTE carrier -- it's also compatible with e/CSFB insofar as your device will be able to properly receive incoming call pages through the LTE carrier and switch to the CDMA carrier.

Can confirm -- currently living in Ratchet City, and we didn't see any band 41 LTE anywhere in the market until these started popping up this year.

RSRP is a measure of received (downlink) signal. HPUE effects the transmitted (uplink) signal from the UE back to the BTS and results in a larger usable coverage area.

And all of our children are above average.

That's cute. You can literally open my map right now and press F11 to get a "full screen view" if you want to. Not sure what they would need to change on the backend.

Historically, if you enabled Google Voice integration with your Sprint number, and you set messages to be delivered to the Google Voice app (NOT to your device directly i.e. what you're doing with Textra), incoming MMS would skip the Google Voice app and still go directly to the device instead.

Does Sprint GV integration still only send incoming MMS to your Sprint device?

SignalCheck can't properly identify the B41 mini macro sites in the area because they share GCI space with B26 sites. If the second hex digit from the right is a 3 or a 4 (e.g. 31, 3A, 42) then you're on band 41.

There are some B41 mini macros in the area.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=salty

That's a live deployment at the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans during an NBA game.

The handful of sites in the New Orleans market that received B41 mini macro upgrades were "local asks" by market/regional managers and weren't part of any larger roll-out plan. They still have approved permits across the market going back 2-3 years for full 8T8R installations that haven't happened yet. The TDD ratio change also made a difference, but I think the aspect that's getting overlooked is subscriber loss (especially with the new Verizon UDP offering). New Orleans used to have Sprint's highest market share percentage nationwide, so the only place it can really go is down; and you can bet that the recent influx of advertising dollars into New Orleans and Baton Rouge is a good indication of where subscriber numbers have been going. They largely ignored investing anything into the state for as long as possible since they really didn't have much to gain, and now the subscriber count has corrected itself to be more inline with their deployed infrastructure. We track the deployment and performance of all four carriers statewide. In New Orleans specifically, T-Mobile has gone from 10 to 40-50 MHz of LTE on-air for most sites over the past few months, but their performance since Christmas has been plummeting; and even AT&T is having a difficult time keeping up with demand even while averaging 50-90 MHz of LTE on-air for most sites (with 2-3x the Sprint site density in some areas). Verizon has been converting 3-sector, 60 MHz sites to 6-sector, 90 MHz beasts in busy areas, and they've added so many new full build macro sites in the last 6 months that I can't even remember them all. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying their sudden, recent interest in the area isn't a good thing; but it's important to understand the overall context of where they stand versus the competition, and what I'm seeing right now are a few token upgrades and a press release to try to quell port-outs.

Sprint added a handful of B41 mini macros to congested NV sites, but most of the actual improvement in the Ookla numbers comes from the new Sprint-hosted speed test server that popped up in New Orleans ahead of the gigabit demo. Latency is about 50% lower and throughput is about 50% higher in comparison to other nearby speed test servers.

How interesting that they chose to demo 4x4 MIMO in a market where they abandoned over half of their 8T8R install permits over the last 2-3 years and are now only installing 2T2R mini macros (which, correct me if I'm wrong, aren't capable of 4x4 MIMO).

Three out of three of the ones that I track: New Orleans [Greater] Louisiana East Texas The [Greater] Louisiana and East Texas markets have two B41 installations each, all of which are mini macros added to existing NV sites within the last 2-3 months. The New Orleans market has about 55 out of about 350 total NV sites, 7 of which are again mini macros added recently. There are a handful more mini macro installations scheduled, but all of them are "local asks" by regional managers and aren't part of any meaningful rollout.