lordsutch

ECI=E-UTRAN Cell Identity (aka "hex id").

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The HTC patch for LTE ECIs and TACs should be going into Cyanogenmod nightlies in the next day or so: http://review.cyanogenmod.org/#/c/45607/

Umm... Feagin Mill and Corder don't cross... and aren't even all that close to each other.

Sorry, meant Feagin Mill and Moody.

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I picked up a 4g signal today on Russell Pkwy in Warner Robins. It was connected from Corder road to the Base.

They must have finally thrown the switch on the site at Feagin Mill & Corder. About bloody time.

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AFAIK nTelos hasn't deployed a single piece of NV equipment yet, and probably won't until Sprint forces them to in their next wholesale agreement renewal, so the lack of ESMR anything (or G block LTE) in nTelosland shouldn't be a surprise.

I put in an order for Moko's similar model earlier today, since I've been happy with their original Nexus 7 case (and family have liked the same brand Kindle Fire HD case).  For less than $6 it was a no-brainer; in the meantime, their original Nexus 7 case more-or-less works on the 2013 model while I wait.

Alas the "market" train left the station when AT&T started advertising having 4G (at the time, and probably still today, mostly HSDPA) in "2000 more cities and towns" than Verizon's LTE.

They're planning one 1x in 800 and rest LTE with more 1x in PCS. Go down to 3x3 800 LTE so you can eliminate CDMA in PCS.

Not gonna happen. In addition to all the legacy Sprint user equipment that only does PCS and Cellular 850 (or even just PCS), there's also the many existing roaming partners who aren't putting CDMA SMR on their phones. Plus that would undermine Sprint's M2M push—I'm not sure how much of that hardware will do SMR.

Looks like 20130730 and later nightlies revert the Samsung change.

Also, got SID 1996 today reported as "Lukas Nace Gutierrez & Sachs"; this appears to be a law firm that specializes in communications law, not the actual license holder.  I believe SID 1996 (and possibly the other SIDs in the region attributed to LNG&S) is really C-Spire.

I'm on a CM nightly, so that is very possible, I know the RIL changes have been very frequent recently.

 

The 1xRTT stats are SID: 16678, NID: 5, BID: 923

You're really on SID 4126. What is happening is that the SID and NID are being interpreted on the Samsung RIL as they are hexadecimal values, although the RIL reports them as decimal.  Nightly CM builds dated 20130720 and earlier should be fine.

EDIT: I reported this to the relevant Gerrit code review; hopefully the change will be backed out. The latest patch for the HTC RIL has a similar problem too, although it hasn't made it into CM yet (probably because they're busily working to integrate the Android 4.3 code dump).

Speaking of that, I've been meaning to upload this for a couple days...

 

 

Any idea what in the world happened there? That SID in the 100k range, and my signal strength jumped up significantly compared to normal conditions in that area, but nothing was usable. I'd wager it was just the AOSP/CM RIL freaking out, but I wonder. I doubt it was a bug in Signalcheck.

If you're on a CM ROM with a Samsung device, there's a bug in SID and NID reporting that was introduced with this change: http://review.cyanogenmod.org/#/c/45784/  Yell and scream on that page and it may get fixed.

As far as antennas go, if it covers PCS A-F it almost certainly covers PCS G too unless they have some sort of filter in the cabling. It may not be optimal for G but pushing another 5 MHz on something designed to cover 100MHz isn't much of a difference.

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Not trying to be greedy, but any plans to implement getPci in CM?  Only asking because I have the code for that already in there as well, but I haven't seen it appearing on any screenshots.  I figure that might help folks with non-HTC devices compare where they are at, since it seems like the getPci value is what is shown on other Engineering screens.

As far as I can tell, the HTC RIL (and the Qualcomm RILs generally, like the Nexus 4's RIL if you enable LTE in the baseband) only report the E-UTRAN Cell ID and the Tracking Area Code, by pretending they're the same info as similar UTMS concepts. There's no physical cell ID to get that's reported to Android from the radio.  That should change in RILs specifically designed for Android 4.2 and later, which shouldn't need any gross hackery and should Just Work as-is, but none seem to be in the wild yet.

Great job, that's awesome! Do you think the final implementation of this will continue to display the CID as an integer, or might it possibly come through as hex? Just trying to decide if I should always convert the CID to hex in my app, or make it optional.

The Android 4.2 API defines the return type from getCi as an integer, so it shouldn't change formats from that. I typically format it for display as hex using String.format("%08X"), so it matches what you'd get from the HTC API.

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It's probably the same RIL under the hood (I doubt HTC would start from scratch for a new model), so in theory it should work on all HTC CDMA/LTE devices.

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I've been doing some work with the CM team to get LTE CID reporting into their ROMs. For the adventurous, see http://review.cyanogenmod.org/#/c/45607/

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I found this in an article at eweek.com about the Mifi 500 LTE:

 

"The MiFi 500 LTE includes Novatel software enhancements to the MiFi Technology Platform that extend usage time through more efficient use of battery capacity. MiFi users on platforms with the enhanced software features will also be able to download files over the Internet faster with MiFi models enhanced with Novatel’s software for Content Delivery Optimization (CDO). By utilizing optimized firmware on the MiFi technology platform, CDO can accelerate download speeds by as much as 30 percent beyond the 4G LTE capabilities of MiFi products. - See more at: http://www.eweek.com/mobile/sprint-novatel-partner-on-mifi-500-lte-mobile-wifi-hotspot/#sthash.wEeLTwS1.dpuf"

 

 

What do you suppose that even means?

Transparent proxy compression, most likely.

In the case of nTelos, I'm not sure they actually "focus on their specific areas tend to have better wireless coverage and customer service" as AJ says. That might be true of some of the better-run regionals like USCC, Cincy Bell, and C-Spire, but nTelos always struck me as being rather half-assed even on the retail side.  Their passage into the arms of Sprint or another suitor will be lamented by few, if any, in their region.

As for nationalization + MVNOs, not even the Europeans have tried that for wireless; if anyone thought it would work, the French would have jumped at it rather than embracing this bizarre Anglo-Saxon idea of companies competing with each other to provide public services (incidentally, where new entrant Free is disrupting the 3 incumbent providers). And in cases in the US where infrastructure ownership has separated from service ownership (for example, the states that have competitive retail electricity for consumers over a common grid, like Texas - essentially the electricity "retailer" acts an MVNO over the grid) the main effect has been higher prices than under regulated vertical integration or public utilities.

Plus under the Nationalization+MVNO model, there'd be no price signal to the network operator to upgrade the underlying network; Sprint is doing NV not as a public service, but because their network sucks and they've lost customers as a result. Politics, not customer demand, would drive upgrades by a nationalized infrastructure provider. That might be great for farmers in Iowa to get rural broadband as part of the quadrennial efforts by presidential candidates to suck up to Iowans, but a lot of folks in places with limited political power will get the shaft (much as many communities, some very large, were shafted when they picked the routings of the Interstates, like the Central Valley of California and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas).

Considering that Ntelos is already a Sprint Rural Alliance member, I believe Sprint will just buy the whole company instead of just the licenses. 

Indeed; at the very least there'd have to be a deal for the sites in the wholesale area (nTelos also owns a network that competes with Sprint in eastern Virginia; they also seem to compete with Shentel according to their coverage map), or otherwise Sprint would be stuck building out I-81 and much of West Virginia again themselves. At that point you've probably taken on so much of nTelos you'd probably be best off buying the whole thing and selling the AWS and WCS off (or voluntarily divesting it as part of the merger).

Can anyone confirm if Sprint's taking the data overages approach of throttling once the data limit is reached? I'd honestly prefer the throttling to maybe 1x once you hit the 2gb of data?

The only throttling is the QoS provision that allows limiting streaming video to 1 Mbps. Presumably they don't want to offer T-Mobile style throttling to differentiate "truly unlimited" from everyone else's throttled unlimited (plus I'd imagine it makes it easier to upsell unlimited data from a hard cap). On capped data plans, you pay overages (as has always been the case for tethering and tablet plans).

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I got 14 up, 6 down when I tested the MGSC/Eisenhower site at the fringe of coverage last week. Haven't run one on the new site at Hartley Bridge yet.

EDIT: Didn't get a chance, since Hartley Bridge is not accepting 4G connections tonight. If I had a sneaky mind I might think Sprint was monitoring Sensorly for sites that are live but shouldn't be "officially" on yet...

EDIT AGAIN: Hartley Bridge is back up again. I get 13 Mbps up, 7 down indoors (LTE signal ≈-100 dBm RSRP) using RootMetrics. Ocmulgee East may also be on, since I briefly caught a signal corresponding to its expected Hex ID this evening on Hawkinsville Rd.

Just got 4g today in dry branch, ga off of hwy 16 near i75 all the way up to hwy 247.

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.

Sensorly map also shows 4G along I-475 and Eisenhower Parkway on the west side of Macon.  I haven't been up there, so it wasn't me that mapped it.

 

Still nothing here in Warner Robins/Houston County, but a local provider says they have completed fiber to all Sprint sites within their footprint.

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.

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