pyroscott

The frequency has very, very little to do with LTE speeds. As was stated earlier, LTE is very signal strength dependent. If you are seeing a low, or noisy signal, you will not have good speeds. See this post to determine your LTE signal http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/2040-bars-lie-for-lte-signal-strength-how-to-determine-your-actual-lte-signal-strength/ If your signal is actually high, then yes, I would imagine speeds will improve. Some members in markets that are farther along in the deployment have said that the downtilt was adjusted as more LTE sites came online, improving the ground level signal strength and speeds greatly. If you are having good signal and slow speeds, I would assume that the site is not fully optimized. Unless the site has a ton of traffic, you should be seeing at least 25 Mbps at the base of the tower. It is possible that the tower you went to is not active, or is 3G only. Sometimes our info is incorrect, that should be expected since we are not affiliated with Sprint. I doubt that is as good as it gets. I'm not sure if Shentel will deploy 800mhz LTE or Voice. I would sure think they would, but it all depends on their agreement with Sprint. If Shentel is deploying, I would give it a 95% chance that it will be on the cell site you are connecting to. I don't believe that Sprint will be selling unlimited data on MiFi devices. Something like that might be in the works with the Clearwire spectrum, but I really don't have any idea. I can't see it ever happening using the PCS or ESMR spectrum.

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It is possible that the nexus has a slightly weaker radio... I have noticed slightly improved signal strength numbers and bars since going from the gnex to the gs3, but I have not noticed additional coverage area due to the "better" signal strength. There are a couple places that I occasionally visit that I would drop calls and/or have no signal with the gnex, and the GS3 behaves the same in those areas.

Did you look at the actual signal numbers? Or just the bars? There is nothing scientific about the bars.

The $10 fee is for having a smartphone, not for 4G. Smartphones use at least 10x the data of a feature phone. A lawsuit would have absolutely no bearing. I would think extended area is roaming...

The part where you said that Sprint is trying to avoid a lawsuit because of the $10 smartphone fee. There is not a shred of fact to that statement. Even if someone tried to push a lawsuit of that sort, it would be thrown out of court faster than you can say "frivolous lawsuit."

No, don't even start with that kind of bs.

I've never been brave enough to get one of those big beast batteries. I always worry that it will be too thick for me and I will go back to the stock battery anyway.

I've never seen it...

I'm reasonably sure that every single market upgrade has started on the fringe of the large city in the market, then moved into the core city. If you are currently able to use wimax, I would wait a couple months to upgrade. Unless you have WiFi to use...

In the first markets, connections were blocked until the market was launched. I hope that this isn't the case in MN though...

It would suck if someone volunteered to host a pico cell from their house and since they were under the cell, they saw so benefit of the cell... much like if you are standing at the base of a cell tower the signal overshoots you.

It is as accurate as those who map coverage make it. It is fed entirely by sensorly users, so if coverage areas are missing, it could merely be because nobody has mapped it.

That is correct, if by "in used", you mean "unused" Not trying to be a grammar Nazi, but it can make a big difference in the meaning of the sentence.

Discussing apps that circumvent Sprint's control of tethering is prohibited in the site rules. I expect all conversation regarding this matter to cease or there will be disciplinary action. Edit: I see tt0h beat me to it... now that is good peer moderation

You can only have one carrier deployed on a piece of spectrum. So if you are deploying a 5x5 carrier on the PCS G Block, that is it, no other carriers on the G Block. The amount of carriers Sprint, or any other cell carrier can deploy is limited to the amount of spectrum they have leased from the government. In markets that Sprint is considered spectrum constrained, they own approximately 20Mhz of PCS plus the G Block. The LTE devices currently offered by Sprint can only use LTE in the PCS spectrum, so they are limited to deploying carriers in PCS blocks A-G. Sprint needs to keep 1x voice and EV-DO on air, so they have few options to add more carriers for 1x, EV-DO or LTE unless they buy more spectrum from another carrier. It has to be PCS though. For instance, let's pretend that Sprint purchased Dish's AWS-4 20x20 block of spectrum, they would have to release new devices before they would be able to deploy any carriers on AWS and have them see any use or provide relief for their current 1x 3G and 4G carriers. Bingo! Pico-cells would be the socially responsible thing for all the carriers to do, but buying more spectrum and deploying more carriers is the path all the US carriers have decided to follow. Now they complain that we are in a spectrum crunch, even though the problem can be reduced with small cells.

The nationwide PCS G-Block will be deployed on 1 carrier per sector. The ESMR spectrum, once reclaimed from Nextel, will be deployed with one carrier for 1xA and one carrier for LTE per sector because it is 14 Mhz, 7 up 7 down. 5x5 of that will be LTE and the other 2x2 Mhz will be 1xA, guard bands, and possibly a very small slice of unused spectrum. 1xA uses 1.25x1.25, so I'm not sure what is happening with the other .75x.75 Mhz... Once a G block carrier starts seeing heavy loading and hits a certain threshold that Sprint has most likely set, they will add another carrier with other available PCS spectrum. In some areas, Sprint is spectrum constrained, like Chicago (pre US Cellular transaction) and might have difficulty adding carriers without dipping into spectrum previously allocated to EV-DO and/or 1x voice. LTE carriers can be 1.5x1.5 3x3 5x5 10x10 or 20x20, so they could possibly reduce the size of another carrier and add a small LTE carrier.

Pretty much... as long as it will always give you that speed correct They can add carriers just the same as they do with EV-DO. Once more customers are on LTE phones, I would expect Sprint will start dropping ED-DO carriers for LTE carriers. Sprint can reuse the same spectrum for 3 sectors per cell site (which most are set up to have 3 sectors) as well as neighboring cell sites. They do need to manage interference though, because if the sectors/cell sites overlap too much, the noise will cause the QAM to drop and speeds will drop. Also, this is why there is a lot of talk about small cells, or pico cells. The smaller the cell, the more available bandwidth for users because there are fewer users than a macro cell that may be broadcasting miles in every direction.

Well the LTE carrier airlink can be broken down very far into time slots, packets etc. The amount of users a single 5x5 carrier on one sector of a cell site can support depends on what the users are doing with their connection. If it is large file downloads, streaming video, constant speed tests or even streaming audio, the carrier will be able to connect far fewer concurrent connections without any noticeable speed dip than a carrier that has less data intensive connections from tapatalk, casual web browsing etc. Basically, at 64 QAM (or at very good signal levels) all the users of the carrier are sharing approximately 35Mbps. If there are 5 users downloading large files and using the maximum amount of bandwidth, they would each have approximately 7Mbps speeds. If there are 10 users in that example, they would see approximately 3.5Mbps and so on. Now if there was noise or lower signal strength, the connection would drop to a lower QAM and speeds would drop. In the 5 user example, if 2 of the users dropped to 32 QAM, their speeds would drop to 3.5Mbps while the rest would be 7Mbps still. At cell edge, you would get even slower speeds while still taking up the same percentage of the total capacity. The line gets much blurrier when you add in the users who are using less data intensive applications and can share time slots or finish their use quickly and allow others to connect. A 10x10 carrier has approximately 70Mbps to distribute over the users connected to it at 64 QAM, so you could generalize and say that it has double the capacity. 2-5x5 carriers brings you back up to that 70Mbps number, but on an unloaded carrier, or light-use carrier, your max speeds, or speeds at cell edge will be slower. (unless you are using carrier aggregation)

I really like the salsa mixed in with the eggs of the omelet.

Speeds near the cell site will be blazing fast thanks to the 2500Mhz "fat pipe" hotspots. Then, in the outlying areas/indoor coverage, speeds will be more modest with 1900Mhz and 800Mhz 5x5 carriers providing the LTE in those areas. It might be nice to have a 10x10 carrier on 1900, but with the (current) devices not supporting the band class required or 10x10 LTE carriers, the whole discussion is much ado about nothing. As far as the number of connections that can be serviced by a 10x10 vs 2-5x5... There will be little to no difference in the number of connections. Also, as long as the network has the appropriate management tools to load up both 5x5 carriers equally, there will be very little difference in speeds as long as we aren't talking about an unloaded cell site that could throw the additional Mhz to allow higher max speeds.

I am talking about the advances that occur within the early generations of technology. Carrier aggregation is still within its early stages, and could see advances in reducing power consumption similar to what LTE devices saw between their first and second generations of devices.

Today, yes, but look how far phones have come along at dealing with LTE power drain since the first devices that came out. The Thunderbolt pales in comparison to the EVO LTE or GS3. That is in a matter of just over a year between the TB and the EVO LTE (17 March 2011 to 2 June 2012) When/if the H-block can be deployed, there is a good possibility that carrier aggregation could be much less of a power drain, or there could be large advances in battery technology. It has been a long time since we had any large advances in battery tech...

My Pinto makes a great omelet.