lordsutch

Nice catch; looks like the site in the Ocmulgee East Industrial Park is now live. Strange I didn't catch it yesterday on my drive back from Dublin. EDIT: It appears it may have just been in testing mode briefly on Saturday; the site wasn't accepting connections yesterday (July 15th), even sitting right on the tower (after cycling airplane mode, I'd get a brief LTE indication and then get kicked immediately to 1xRTT). The only previously unmapped site in the area that seems to be accepting LTE connections is the one in Eatonton.

I don't see the hate; these plans seem like Simply Everything at a lower price point, and are particularly advantageous for people who are running shared non-smartphone plans. For someone like my colleague who has a dumb phone and has no interest in smartphones, I'm sure he'd jump at $50 for unlimited text + calling (versus $99 today). You'd also come out ahead if you're doing Everything Data shared with dumb phones on most of the lines. These plans aren't intended for S4GRU junkies, any more than T-Mobile's prepaid unlimited calling+text plan with 100MB of unthrottled data is intended for a T-Mobile smartphone data junkie.

I mapped it Monday and Tuesday; it also carries a bit more to the east than shown on the map (east of Bloomfield Road), but Sensorly didn't record that coverage since I wedged the phone in LTE-only mode, and Sensorly refuses to record in that mode. No sign of 800 1X coverage yet though. As for Warner Robins, I expect that whenever they get around to climbing the remaining towers* those will go live with 4G (and maybe even 800), while they'll hold off on switching on 4G at the other sites until they decide to switch all the 3G sites over to NV to save driving to the site multiple times. I count 6 remaining Houston County non-GMO towers based on my visual checks: Perry on US 41 by South Perry Pkwy Elberta Rd at Houston Rd Dunbar Rd at Houston Lake Blvd Carl Vinson Pkwy at the curve south of Watson Blvd The water tower off Pleasant Hill Rd south of Watson Blvd Feagin Mill Road tower between Houston Lake Blvd and Lake Joy Road AFAIK the only tower in the area that has had tower work done but isn't accepted is the one SE of Payne City; RRUs have been up on that site for several weeks now. It may be the next one in the area to go 4G live since the RRUs on the tower by M(G)SC had been up for weeks before finally going 4G live last week.

Just laid down a big area of purple on the west side of Macon, Ga, so it can go on the list. Sent from my EVO using Tapatalk 4 Beta

North Central Florida, represent! (Forest High School, Ocala, class of '93 here.)

Sprint plans to upgrade all of its native sites to LTE (4G) as part of Network Vision, which will also add EVDO coverage as well. Unless this is one of the few remaining affiliate areas not run by Sprint, it should be upgraded in the next year at worst. Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

For the non-sponsors, we've been starting to see some live LTE in the Georgia market. Sensorly shows live coverage southwest of Auburn (in Alabama, but in the Georgia market) and I mapped live coverage outside of Albany yesterday. There may also be a live site on the NW side of Dublin. LTE marches on! Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

You can move Albany GA over to the pre-launch column. http://www.sensorly.com/map/4G/US/USA/Sprint/lte_310sprint#q=albany, ga

Sounds like a mission for SoftBank.

Just remember, it's not a trick, it's an illusion.

Well, they have to cover 30% of the POPs in each license area with something, and considering that Softbank has committed to pull all the Huawei equipment Clearwire has installed (along with the need for cost reduction by eliminating leases and backhaul to locations where there's Clearwire equipment but no Sprint equipment), that probably means a lot of LTE deployment on protection sites for starters. And when Sprint climbs towers to pull down the dead PCS-only panels they might as well put up a 2500 panel + RRU at the same time, at least in the urban/suburban areas where customer density justifies it.

Here's the intersection in question, I think (zoom in for the label). The Sprint tower linked above is just south of I-85 on the map, about 2000 feet away. I'll PM you the site ID.

Correction... the closet site to this location, behind the fire station on Monroe Drive, hasn't been 4G accepted yet. That would surely account for the weak 4G signal - it's an area designed to be covered by that site.

Sprint's always been a more desirable carrier for rural customers than T-Mobile due to roaming availability (I don't think T-Mobile offered AMPS roaming at all, and even today on postpaid T-Mobile offers less roaming capability than Sprint, particularly on the data front), so it's not surprising the rural towers would be more heavily loaded on the Sprint side despite similar native coverage.

The only exception I'd make to mr.phoneguy's commentary is that in general, where Sprint corporate built the market (the major metros, Florida, etc.), they built it properly with overlapping towers, at least to cover the POPs they planned to cover. For example, when we've had towers in Macon go down due to NV work, we've still had nearly 100% outdoor native coverage (indoor is a different story, but of course the footprint wasn't designed for 100% indoor coverage with phones with internal antennas like we have today). The bad markets are almost always the former affiliate markets, such as the notorious Baton Rouge market, where the affiliate was often building on the cheap. Those definitely do need to be fixed with small cells if ESMR doesn't do the job, and if they do it will help Sprint's reputation in those markets substantially. Of course there are exceptions to every rule; Shentel for example seems to be one of the affiliates that was on the ball, and not surprisingly it's one of the few Sprint hasn't insisted on gobbling up. And even corporate markets have issues with event crowds, since Sprint seems to lag the Big Two on DAS deployments and COWs for events.