aloha

I'm curious if anyone knows. I live in Lake Forest Park, north end of Lake Washington and every month for the past 4-5 months the tower(s) have gone down for a number of days. Anyone have any idea what might be going on?

 

Thanks in advance.

Cross streets would be most helpful.

To clarify - twice the signal in raw numbers, doesnt work out to twice the performance.

I'd have to sit down and work out the math.

 

That said, no - at least not in the way our handsets measure signal strength (aka, bars, in absolute signal, yes), a 3db change would be enough to change a place from a place where voice calls may not work at all, or unreliably to a place where voice calls work quite reliably. It will turn the marginal and fringe into more reliable spots.

 

I believe that most of the problems we experience are backhaul, not RAN related. NV replaces the problematic backhaul, in the places where NV has rolled out, I've seen a great improvement in call stability and data speeds, even when I cant get LTE.

I'd have to sit down and work out the math.

That said, no - at least not in the way our handsets measure signal strength (aka, bars, in absolute signal, yes), a 3db change would be enough to change a place from a place where voice calls may not work at all, or unreliably to a place where voice calls work quite reliably. It will turn the marginal and fringe into more reliable spots.

I believe that most of the problems we experience are backhaul, not RAN related. NV replaces the problematic backhaul, in the places where NV has rolled out, I've seen a great improvement in call stability and data speeds, even when I cant get LTE.

Does an increase of 3db mean about twice the signal strength?

Tower Mounted RRU's will actually help quite a bit, they effectively lower the noise floor for the band by a couple db. This makes all the difference with CDMA/LTE.

You're likely on an adjacent tower when you took this screenshot, LTE has just not been turned up there yet.

Last Wednesday, I checked my phone while waiting for the bus at 98th & 116th in Juanita (right by Michael's and was surprised to see a steady 4G LTE on my S3.  It was only one bar and the connection wasn't speedy, but the signal was steady. Hoping they finish whatever they are doing to that site and turn it up soon.

 

Some notes about NV in Western Washington:

There are no 800 MHZ RRH's going up anywhere in the 'Seattle' market, which runs from 40 miles or so north of Portland to the Canadian Border and from the Pacific Ocean to the Cascade Mountains - that said, East Washington supposedly IS getting 800mhz RRH's - The sites are wired to allow installation of the RRH's (breakers and fiber are already in) at a later date however.

The rumor is, is that there is supposedly a shortage of cabinets, which is some of why acceptance has slowed to a crawl.

As evidenced by NV upgraded sites, Backhaul not RAN is the underlying performance issues with the legacy Lucent network. Consider that a common setup for the CDMA gear was 6 bonded T's to a site. and that was it. meaning at the very most 9 megs shared among the sites users.

There has been no wholesale conversion of iDEN sites to CDMA - that said, any iDEN site built after 2006 or so has an CDMA cabinet in it - something else to note - the iDEN sites are all spaced for 800 eSMR - not 1900 PCS.