JWMaloney

The universal standard doesn't exist yet. They're implementing Google's standard.

Not all Verizon towers have EV-DO anymore

Click the green tower pin and the cell details will appear in the pane on the left. Cells 65-67 (0x41, 0x42, 0x43) are the third carrier.

Link

Tim, 3C B41 is live in New Orleans, but all 3 B41 carriers have been reduced to 2x2 MIMO. Any idea why?

It's definitely not dead. They're burying fiber all over my area right now for gigabit.

Yes, what about it?

This is an all-too-common issue with the Nexus 5. Both of mine were eventually affected as well as those of just about everyone I knew that had one. The permanent fix is a replacement power button. A local store was able to do the repair on one of mine for around $40-50. I was able to fix the other bu taking it apart and wiggling the button, but I still have these sitting around for when it eventually fails completely:

Robert brings up an excellent point that is often overlooked. One thing I've noticed with Cricket in busy areas is that the sheer number of requests during a task can add up to a real-world delay of several seconds. Client applications will sometimes treat the high latency as a connection timeout (e.g. showing an X where a photo should have loaded, or a search returning "Can't reach Google at the moment"). While the delays are frequent enough to notice (particularly during brief interactions such as performing a search or setting a reminder), they are negligible in comparison to Sprint's performance in the same locations. Being stuck on a poor EV-DO signal often means that the resulting low throughput will result in a longer wait time than the high latency alone would on Cricket; and that's if the requests are even completed successfully. Of course, that type of situation on Sprint usually results in low throughput and high latency, with client applications treating it as connection timeouts. A lot of modern software is written to fail quickly and show an error rather than to wait indefinitely.

Sprint did not claim that it was no longer planning to spend $15 billion over 3 years. Sprint issued a lower guidance for this year only due to regulatory issues. That means that when the regulatory hurdles are cleared, spending will increase. Expect to see a jump in FY2017 when many of their expenses actually hit the books.

That's MFBI identifying their band 17 deployment as band 12.

There is 1 band 41 site just south of Slidell along I-10.

There are any number of issues at play which may have effected their decision. In New Orleans (where they have the D block), I fully expect them to eventually transition to 10x10 LTE across the entire A block; but for now, they have a consistent 2C configuration across the whole market. I also don't know what CDMA carriers are actually active at this point (I have depicted what would still fit from their "high capacity" band plan used during the RRUS 31 deployment); but I do know for sure that most sites didn't get the full complement of multiple PCS antennas and radios. The sites that didn't would only be able to run 6 CDMA carriers with 2 LTE carriers active.

Your math seems a little off. Unless I'm mistaken, there should be a 250 kHz guard between CDMA and LTE: 8109 is one of their standard A block configurations, so that's probably why they went with it as opposed to doing something special for this market. There's also the possibility that they could be trying to get back the tail of the A block from AT&T (BR) and T-Mobile (NOLA), but it isn't likely considering both have deployed LTE on it now. I'm also not sure I share your confidence that they could squeeze in a fourth carrier in the real world without running into RF roll-off and PIM issues; but if they can, then they definitely should, because 3G is still saturated even today with their sparse deployment.

Unfortunately they went with EARFCN 8109 for the whole market. Funny you should mention that, because everybody flocked to Nextel when Katrina hit and took out all the other networks.

Looks like it's happening sooner than expected. Baton Rouge went live today with 2C B25, and there certainly hasn't been any densification effort there.

We got 2C B25 in the East Texas market at the end of last year shortly after the B26 TAC offset was removed. New Orleans market did just get 2C B25 this month (although they still have the B26 TAC offset). For those who are in markets where B25 PCIs have changed *and* B41 is available, are you seeing the same PCIs across all three bands now?

There was a brief service interruption in Ericsson land this afternoon, and when LTE came back, all the PCIs had changed. The 169 offset is gone completely. It looks like they're using the standard color/code group system now, e.g. PCI 387, 388, 389 = code/color 129/0, 129/1, 129/2.

PRL doesn't affect LTE

Take a look at eNodeB 180321 / 184321 for another one.

Sprint wants them in a lot of places because they're much cheaper to put up than full-blown macro sites.

There are devices that don't support 1X Advanced over 800 MHz SMR?

People on both sides of the issue are missing a key aspect of Mobilite's solutions: they are proposing 70-foot wooden poles in many areas. Those who write off Sprint's small cell efforts fail to realize that these mini macro cells are going to be practically the same height as many of AT&T and Verizon's full-scale macro antennas. They need these to be tall enough to propagate high-band spectrum over nearby buildings. On the other side, those who simply cry NIMBY should take a good look at the photo in the linked article: The utility pole pictured is 30 feet tall. Mobilite wants to put in poles more than twice that height. That's why people are upset. Half of Alltel's macro network in Baton Rouge, Louisiana is wooden poles, and even they used 30-footers. The only reason these things are going to be considered small cells at this point are because of the mini macro equipment installed on them.

Lack of funds were absolutely an issue during Network Vision. A lot of the delays were directly caused by decisions they made to reduce cost. For example, Sprint tried to coordinate high speed backhaul installation with equipment upgrades to minimize the amount of time they would be paying for the increased capacity without using it. They also avoided urban microwave usage as a stopgap even though Clearwire had the expertise to build North America's largest microwave backhaul deployment. Yes, I'm aware they needed those savings; but they probably could have justified the cost if it had helped them avoid losing so many subscribers (and so much revenue). The industry staffs enough people to accommodate the work that it gets. T-Mobile already has a huge L700/L1900 overlay project underway in south Louisiana for a 700 MHz license that they didn't even own before Sprint started NGN deployments, but Sprint hasn't even begun permitting yet, yet alone have they settled on all of their mini macro candidates. They're still sitting on permits that were approved in 2014-2015 for 2.5 equipment installations.

As if on cue, mine stopped working today. Who has cheap Verizon SIM cards? Walmart only has a $50 activation kit.