lordsutch

Yep. I'm originally from Putnam County, Florida.

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.

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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!

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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.

Is Gob Bluth doing a magic show nearby?? 

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.

I googled the intersection he gave, it came up with piedmont Rd ne and lakeshore Dr ne, unless I am missing something? Is there somewhere else they intersect?

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.

Ok based on that intersection it seems like all the surrounding towers have already been upgraded to 4g.  I would say keep monitoring your lte signal strength and see if it persists.

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.

There are some weak areas in the market still - the DAS in the airport isn't upgraded yet (no 4G on the Plane Train), and there are some gaps in coverage here and there.  But by and large the market is pretty solid, particularly with a well-performing LTE phone (the EVO 4G LTE I'd say is at the weak end).

Sensorly or it didn't happen

The big thing I think to get LTE to work on T-Mobile prepaid is to have the right APN settings.  They were mentioned in a recent thread... if I had my Nexus 4 in front of me, I'd be able to tell you what they are.  I was able to stay connected quite a bit in SLC with the Nexus 4 last week (the T-Mobile LTE trace from downtown to the airport on Sensorly is me).

I have the LG-made Nexus 4 and can't complain about anything hardware wise; of course, the software updates are on Google's side and there's only been 1-2 (and I haven't accepted 4.2.2 so I can LTE hunt on T-Mobile), which wouldn't be the case with the G-series.  That's the only modern LG device I've had (I did have the Muziq and some ancient flip phone - 5250? - once upon a time).

The maps have had the capability to show coverage by device for quite a while now; it's reasonable to expect the 1x 800 (and eventual LTE 800 and LTE 2500) footprints to be shown on this basis too.

Here's my list:

LG 5250

Samsung A940

LG Musiq

Palm Pre

HTC Evo 4G

HTC Evo 4G LTE

You can now add Tupelo, MS; Holly Springs, MS; and Pontotoc, MS to the pre-launched list; quite a bit of purple now in these places.

On the plus side (even though I still think this is all driven by paranoid xenophobia), pulling the Huawei equipment almost certainly means a faster LTE rollout for Clear, since they'll have to replace whatever Huawei equipment is on the protection sites anyway.

Frankly if (and I emphasize if) 600 MHz happens, it wouldn't surprise me if the FCC insisted on auction winners doing a lot better than Sprint and T-Mobile have to date with rural coverage, perhaps even on par with the geographic coverage requirements that Cellular 850 has.

Try removing the .*14 part; if you're still not getting any messages (and you are in Radio mode, not Main mode), it may require a debugging mode to be enabled in your ROM. Seems to work out of the box on CM at least.

Of course, I posted the aLogCat advice on the basis that we were talking about the LG Optimus G, which has a Qualcomm radio just like the EVO's. I honestly don't know what a Galaxy Nexus with the VIA LTE chipset would report.

On the GNex, another place you might find the data is on the Radio Info screen, which you can access using the dialer code *#*#4636#*#* or via the menu in SignalCheck; the LTE info appears next to the "CellInfo" label, if available.

1. Get aLogCat from the market.

2. Open it.

3. In preferences, click on "Buffer?" and choose "Radio"

4. Tap back.

5. Tap the magnifying glass icon.

6. In the text box, type "DATA_REGISTRATION_STATE.*14" (no quotes).

7. Check the box labeled "Apply as regular expression?"

8. Tap Okay.

You should now see the LTE registration messages from the radio. If there's a HEX ID being reported by the RIL, it should be the third number in each message. It should look something like:

D/RILJ ( 1863): [0050]< DATA_REGISTRATION_STATE {1, 9d00, 0266b103, 14, 0, 20}

The part in bold is the HEX ID. I have no idea what the number before it is (possibly the TAC?).

You might be able to get HEX ids from the Android radio log. Use aLogCat or another logcat tool, watch the radio log (in aLogCat, it's under preferences), and look for DATA_REGISTRATION_STATE messages with 14 as the fourth value. I believe the Qualcomm RIL always provides the HEX ID on these as the third value - it does on my Evo LTE, and the same pattern shows up in pastebin output from phones from several different carriers and manufacturers.

After watching the radio log on my EVO LTE today, it appears the Qualcomm RIL used by AOSP reports the LTE Cell Identity as if it was the UMTS CID, and it reports something else (probably the TAC/tracking area code; looking at pastebins it's too big to be the PCI/physical cell ID, alas) as if it was the UMTS LAC.

The bad news is that the internal telephony code in AOSP doesn't report this info via any exposed APIs. The good news is that it shouldn't be hard to hack the reporting into the existing code, although getting it accepted into CM may be a challenge.

This is a rather interesting read though, admittedly I cannot vouch for the veracity of it's contents:

 

http://denbeste.nu/c.../10/GSM3G.shtml

Den Beste is partially right, but largely outdated. The transition to EVDO for CDMA exhibited a lot of the same negatives that he identifies for the GSM->W-CDMA transition (which was ongoing at the time); the only real "win" for 1X -> EVDO is that because the minimum bandwidth for 1x and EVDO channels was/is narrower, carriers were likely to have enough spectrum on hand to switch on an EVDO channel while keeping 1x up. Had 3GPP had the sense to specify 1.25 MHz channels for W-CDMA, the GSM->W-CDMA issues would have been less. (And W-CDMA was able to keep updating without a completely new network for a decade, with HSPA and friends coming later.)

Furthermore 1X -> EVDO had one problem that wasn't true of GSM->W-CDMA/UMTS; since both GSM and UMTS allow voice and data traffic simultaneously, you can actually switch off GSM or never launch a GSM network in the first place if you're a new entrant like Three in the UK. CDMA carriers have to keep both active, since EVDV never materialized (Sprint and Verizon thought the future was in VoIP, which essentially is what VoLTE will be, so they didn't sign up). Canada's Public Mobile, which only launched last year on the PCS G block, has to have both 1X and EVDO carriers. And while you can reallocate carriers back and forth between the two, it's not as dynamic as W-CDMA allows.

And of course the market situation in the US is much different now; Cingular and old-AT&T merged (and eventually became AT&T again) and T-Mobile emerged from the PowerTel/VoiceStream regional networks and some others, and moved to W-CDMA as the bugs were worked out. The US market ultimately didn't pick a "winner" - it picked two. And then Verizon picked LTE over WiMax and UMB (EVDO Rev C), and the rest is history.