lordsutch

FWIW I have the 516TQ (white D in a gray circle) in my Pixel 3XL and it seems to work fine. Ting still lists it as being the right SIM for the Pixel 3/3XL too, so I have no idea why they removed it from the list.

On 10/23/2018 at 1:24 AM, Swordfish said:

Is this Sim card available at best buy 

Some folks on r/sprint have reported successfully getting the right SIM card at Best Buy (it is the same one used for the iPhone XS).

I don't think the Boost Mobile BYOD pack has been updated yet to include the 516TQ SIM card.

On 10/19/2018 at 9:45 AM, nexuss4g said:

Someone on reddit posted that Wi-Fi Calling works on Sprint after enabling the setting. Can someone confirm this? 

https://old.reddit.com/r/Sprint/comments/9pclec/pixel_3_xl_performance_on_sprint/e81drdx/

Yes, it works. You can choose between "Mobile preferred" (default) and "Wi-Fi preferred."

On 10/20/2018 at 3:19 PM, nexgencpu said:

Wow Verizon 1x in combination with TMobile roaming! I guess Sprint has zero service there, not even 1x800. Crazy to see TMobile service and no 1x Sprint.

Outdoors I can occasionally get Sprint 1x but the nearest 800 tower on I-16 is pretty far away; the nearer towers are a mix of GMOs and sites that never got 1900 LTE at all. I think the tower T-Mobile is on in Cochran also had Nextel coverage but Sprint didn't bother expanding its footprint there; you'd think having a college campus with 2000 students would translate into enough customers to be worth serving, but apparently not.

On 10/20/2018 at 3:19 PM, nexgencpu said:

Wow Verizon 1x in combination with TMobile roaming! I guess Sprint has zero service there, not even 1x800. Crazy to see TMobile service and no 1x Sprint.

Outdoors I can occasionally get Sprint 1x but the nearest 800 tower on I-16 is pretty far away; the nearer towers are a mix of GMOs and sites that never got 1900 LTE at all. I think the tower T-Mobile is on in Cochran also had Nextel coverage but Sprint didn't bother expanding its footprint there; you'd think having a college campus with 2000 students would translate into enough customers to be worth serving, but apparently not.

Now that my Pixel 3 XL is activated on Sprint, it's roaming on T-Mobile in Cochran today. Not sure if something changed at their end or it's down to provisioning or something else being different about this phone compared to the 2 XL.

Here's something weird... I'm sitting down in Cochran, Georgia this afternoon miles away from the nearest Sprint tower I know of, and while I'm waiting for the right SIM to show up in my mail for the Pixel 3 XL I stuck my UK SIM (from Three) in the phone just to keep it active and see what I could find.

On the network list I'm seeing LTE network 311-490, which is a Sprint PLMN (but not listed as Sprint); it seems to be the same site as a T-Mobile site, as the signal strength bars on the "Choose network" screen are fluctuating in sync with each other. But my Pixel 2 XL (with a Sprint SIM in it) isn't connecting to that network; not sure if it's an issue of band support or just the network rejecting connections. I don't know if this is preparation for T-Mobile roaming going live, perhaps for only certain devices (i.e. VoLTE and data-only devices?), but it seems interesting.

My experience is that Sprint will work fine (although, as noted, slowly without a data pass); however, you may experience decreased battery life as your phone may try to stop roaming and find Sprint's network every once in a while.

If you're going to be in London in particular, a prepaid local SIM makes a great deal of sense, in part so you can benefit from the free WiFi access on the Underground which requires a UK SIM card. You can get a local SIM and several gigs prepaid along with a bucket of texts and minutes from all of the providers for £10-20 (i.e. $25 or less) depending on how much data you want. I've had good experiences with both giffgaff (prepaid on O2, will send SIMs to the U.S. for free) and Three (3).

It seems like Sprint has finally decided to roll out band 41 around Macon and Warner Robins; so far there are band 41 deployments on 3 existing sites in Macon and 1 in Warner Robins beyond the replacements for the old WiMax protection sites that went live a few months ago.

For some reason, Sprint has also put band 41 mini-macros on the tower right by the intersection of US 23 and SR 18 near the Plant Scherer power station east of Forsyth... basically the middle of nowhere. All I can figure is they changed the tilt of the antennas to get some more range on band 25 and figured they'd need to fill in the coverage around the tower as a result.

If you're looking to try to find tower locations or correlate GCI/PCI information to towers, here's some code I've been working on that processes the data collected by my SignalDetector app, using the LTE Timing Advance information reported in recent Android versions for triangulation. It's not 100% perfect with only a few data points but it can zero in pretty decently with sufficiently-spaced data points; typically it gets within 50 meters or so of Sprint's recorded GPS coordinates of the towers. https://github.com/lordsutch/cellfinder

An example of what it does is attached. Note that this is not based on anything except data collected from the phone—it's not using any sponsor data from S4GRU to estimate the tower locations, just signal data collected by me driving on I-16 and around the Savannah area in early November.

 

On 1/15/2018 at 9:17 AM, kg4icg said:

I guess a new airspan unit just passed thru fcc certification. 

https://fccid.io/PIDAS1300

 

Interesting design - from the marketing materials, these units are intended to be attached to overhead cable lines and include a built-in cable modem, or can function as an LTE relay where there's already LTE (presumably also band 41) for backhaul, among other interfaces: http://www.airspan.com/airstrand/.

On 12/5/2017 at 5:18 PM, ingenium said:

It SHOULD work as long as both NATs handle UDP connections correctly. The Airave sets up 2 outgoing IPSec VPN tunnels using the standard ports, one for CDMA and one for LTE. UDP NAT timeouts tend to be lower than TCP, but as long as the airave sends or receives a packet every minute or so it should be fine. I think UDP NAT entries tend to be cleared after 1-5 minutes of no activity. I imagine this is already done to prevent NAT from clearing the connection thinking it's finished.

A second NAT shouldn't be any more problematic than single NAT in this regard, so you should be fine.

I was able to get Sprint to send the Airave 3 to my mom's house and hooked it up a week ago. Setup was pretty straightforward once I found a place out of the way where all the cords would reach and I could get a GPS lock with the included puck. (My only peeve: the power cord could stand to be a bit longer.)

So far even though she has a pretty cruddy broadband connection (10/1), which I'm sure would disappoint anyone who gets close enough to her house to connect to the band 41 signal, it seems to be working fine for data, voice, and SMS indoors, even on the LAN side of the router (even though she appears to be triple NATed!).

I wonder if there’s a chance Sprint will lease their 800 spectrum to SouthernLINC in exchange for a roaming agreement.
If my memory serves me correctly, in SouthernLINC’s markets, SouthernLINC + Sprint’s 800 MHz holding are always 813.5-824 (uplink) and 858.5-869 (downlink). That’s 10.5 MHz FDD. Enough spectrum for a 10x10 L800 carrier and a 1x800 carrier...

RRPP (which SouthernLINC is part of) was originally billed as allowing partners to deploy on Sprint's spectrum outside native coverage, so it's possible they'd do that. If they did that it wouldn't surprise me if they reserved a 1.4x1.4 carrier for their "bulletproof" B2B service though.

I added a new feature to the app: now there's a "Share" button in the action bar to send the log files to another app like Dropbox or Google Drive (or email or whatever - anything that will accept text/csv files). Probably in the next version I'll add more fine-grained control of the logging feature (i.e. the ability to only generate some logs, as requested) and a "clear" button in preferences, so people will need to fool with external storage even less.

6 hours ago, PythonFanPA said:

Is there any sort of coverage map to be able to see where this might come into play?

SouthernLINC has recently posted their LTE coverage map. You'll note the "partner coverage" appears to correspond to Sprint's LTE footprint.

Someone at Sprint apparently knows it's my birthday, because it seems like they flipped a switch today and my phone is suddenly picking up at least two new band 41 sites in the Macon and Warner Robins area (one in each); there's probably more but I haven't noticed any obvious tower work so I had no reason to look to see if things were moving or not until today. Maybe I'll have time tomorrow afternoon to go poking around.

2018 should be the year that SouthernLINC finally launches its band 26 LTE network (I've already seen it show up when searching for networks with a UK SIM in my phone), which should help Sprint's roaming footprint in the southeast quite a bit once VoLTE and/or CallingPlus is live on most devices.

Does anyone know if the Airave 3 copes with Double NAT situations OK? My mom's house is in a bit of a coverage black hole for Sprint, about equidistant from 3 macro sites and in a bit of a hollow, so the Airave 3 would make sense there. But her broadband connection & cable is provided by the neighborhood association and there's at least two layers of NAT involved - her cable modem gets a single 10.x.y.z address on the WAN port and then of course within the house there's a router with a more typical 192.168.y.z setup on the LAN side. I assume there's no more translation on the way up based on traceroute, but who knows?

Any experience with the Airave in this situation? She's currently not using a smartphone so the Magic Box wouldn't help her yet - it'd help me when I visit though, and I might eventually get her onto a smartphone at some point. But for now the Airave 3 seems to be the way to go if it'll work.

I had no more luck on the way back; my Pixel 2 XL wouldn't even connect to 1X or 3G on CSpire. My Nexus 6 on Project Fi wouldn't connect either when I forced it to connect via CDMA/LTE using the *#*#FISPR#*#* dialer code.

Att does MFBI b25 and 26.

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk

Now I've had a chance to look through the log, it was definitely not AT&T; it was CSpire (311-230) MFBI (band 2/25), EARFCN 8440 (1970 MHz downlink). There was also quite a bit of band 12, EARFCN 5145; while the phone would register on the network I never got a successful data session and actually had to reboot to get it to connect again to LTE when I got into Sprint coverage.

Something odd with my Pixel 2 XL yesterday: in Itawamba County (on the border with AL east of Tupelo) my phone would connect to CSpire's LTE network but I couldn't get any data session to work ('x' on the signal strength indicator) - although I had no trouble roaming on AT&T LTE in NW Alabama earlier. But perhaps more interesting is that at least some of the towers were broadcasting on Band 25, which is the first evidence I've seen of a RRPP partner deploying on Sprint's spectrum. I also saw some Band 12 (presumably the 700 A block spectrum CSpire bought).

I haven't seen any evidence of Sprint deployment on Band 12 in Memphis so far but I'll keep an eye out.

Spent the weekend in Savannah and spotted some band 41 coverage downtown along Bay Street. However, dropped to 3G around the Savannah Mall & Armstrong - that whole area seems like a coverage black hole for some reason, even though everywhere else I really didn't have any complaints.

6 hours ago, Flompholph said:

I am on the s8 beta android 8.0. I am not seeing the signal detector notification until I pull down the notifications. Almost like a stealth notifucation not sure if that will affect data collection. I just thought you should know it is a little scary to not see it and think it's not running.

Try updating to the latest APK (I've made some tweaks recently to fix issues with Oreo I've experienced with my Pixel 2 XL). You may also need to adjust the notification channel settings for the app - the priority might be set too low.

Ok, I think I've figured out what you're getting at:

 

 

if( (gci & 0x0f0000) >= 0x090000 && gci < 0x0fe00000 && sector == 0x01 ) return 41;

I am concerned that this will reduce the apps main feature, it's ability to track.  I don't mind one (preferably the best signal or average signal) per location, but I do like to have all locations.

 

Hmm. Ok, I think I've figured out a way to reduce some of the redundant logging while still logging every time the reported location moves (although the signal information is going to be stale until the radio sends new information to the framework anyway).

 

 

Also, heads up @lordsutch -- BSL latitude and longitude are flipped in Oreo.. see here: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/63130155

 

Great... and now worked around.

 

Saw your code for mini macros it should work. Thank you I love to use provider for google fusion filters.

 

This also may work for small cells.

 

if(gci  > (gci & 0x00090000) && sector == 0x01 && gci < 0x0FE000000) {
// tower gci greater than 900 and sector is 01 
//but not in shentel. Shentel uses that for B25 SC
               

 return 41;
}

I'm confused as to what this test is trying to do. gci > (gci & 0x00090000) is always going to be false, isn't it?