bmoses

yes and no. mediacom is doing the fiber for the metro so they have to get it hooked up before LTE can be turned on. but even if they get fiber hooked up sprint still has to schedule someone to come out and turn LTE on and test it.

awesome! yay new 4G!!!!! edit: now we need a triband phone to see if 800 LTE is live or not

got your other two 1x800 connections added, thanks! as to this question, in a word, yes, in a bigger word YES! we have the hex (GCI) confirmed for all of the known live towers in the metro so far and that isn't one of them! now the question becomes, what tower was that one coming from. we have a guess as the GCI's seem to be following a pattern but we need more data before we know for sure. the tower your 1x800 signal is coming from is one of our guesses for the GCI your LTE was coming from. only way to find out for sure is to get closer to the tower and see if the signal gets stronger. -80 RSRP is what we shoot for with LTE confirmations.

awesome thank you!!!

All, Looking for some help in confirming some 1x800 connections. There are 8 towers around the downtown area that should be broadcasting 1x800 but no one has posted a screenshot confirming that they are live. If you are a sponsor you can check out the spreadsheet and map in the first post in the link in my sig to see which towers aren't listed as 1x800 live yet. So if you get a 1x800 signal from a tower around downtown please post a screenshot of it from signalcheck so we can get the information added. All i ask is that if you are a sponsor you look in the spreadsheet for the BID(s) you are going to post about and make sure it hasn't already been reported. If you are not a sponsor please at least make sure it hasn't already been posted in this thread before posting. doing that will help cut down on the work i need to do when updating things thanks all for your help!

just to clarify with what you saw with the new plans and subsidies/contracts going away that you mentioned. is this a case of people on other plans can keep their current plan and upgrade model (for the time being)? or are you saying that some point soon they are going to force everyone to these new plans/no subsidies/no contracts? just wanting to clarify for future planning

hello and welcome! there are 9 or 10 towers live with 4G across the metro currently. In december they got all of the towers switched over to the new network vision equipment. over the next few months they will continue to turn more and more 4G on as backhaul becomes available

except for turning on LTE, which doesn't affect voice, the upgrades for des moines are complete. so if you are having issues with a tower i would call in to sprint and have them open a ticket on it. since the towers got switched over to NV equipment last month i've had zero issues. in fact my family members that were complaining all the time about dropped calls and what not, from back when everything was legacy and nothing was going on up till now, haven't had any issues either and are much happier now.

ugh that sucks! did the truck have any markings? like was it for mediacom or ericsson or someone else?

thanks, obviously didn't think about that added it into my original post.

throwing my numbers out there to compare in case it helps anyone else i have 9 lines on my account currently spread over the 1500 and 3000 minute family plans with an 18% discount. I'm also using the MSRP of the GS4 which is $600, or $25/mo, to keep things more even as most people on my account would get a new phone at least every 2 years and would do the payment plan. Current total = 443.13 Current total per line = 49.24 per line with $200 GS4 upgrade price = 57.57 Framily/GS4 total = 450 per line (no 18% off) = 50 per line for 3gigs (18% off) = 58.20 per line for unlimited (18% off) = 66.40 so the only way its the same or cheaper for me is if i either give up unlimited or not finance a device. it would be nice to have the people on my account have their own account and bills so they don't have to pay me each month, and not everyone on my account needs unlimited data, so they could have cheaper bills. for right now though looks like we are sticking with our current plan. only way i see us moving to anything new is if they are about to get rid of unlimited data so i can get in on the unlimited for life guarantee. edit: added in factoring the $200 you would pay for a GS4 when upgrading to it on the current plan as additional monthly payment.

considering i work for them i will have to say yes but seriously, if you mention the name "Caseys" to anyone that grew up in a small town with a caseys in it the first thing out of their mouth will be "i love their pizza!"

know one knows for sure. will there be more LTE turned on by the end of the month? most likely. will all of the towers left to get LTE turned on get turned on by the end of the month? not very likely. i'm finding more and more sites that appear to be running 3G on fiber, even ones that still had slow speeds after getting 3G accepted are now running higher speeds. so thats a good sign since fiber needs to be there for LTE. but there are still plenty of sites that don't appear to have had fiber run to them yet.

looks like It was just the 1 tower. Drove by some others on the way home and got LTE from them.

me and everyone else at my work just lost 4G about 15 minutes ago. not sure if its just the 1 tower that covers us here or all of them. just posting as a heads up

the new My Way plans your discount comes off the data portion of each line. so for 5 lines each getting unlimited data at $30/line it would be 30*.18*5 = $27 total discount.

thanks yeah those darn masses with their pitchforks and torches!!!!

i know, i'm not, i wasn't talking about the orange fiber conduits. last time i saw those being run to a site was over 4 months ago. i'm talking about the box that gets installed that says "mediacom business" on it. that didn't start showing up until well after the orange conduits were seen at sites. thats what i'm basing my guess that fiber is ready at a site on, that box being there and installed. Sure there could still be something that needs hooked up inside that box or somewhere on the backend, but it being there means the site is that much closer to being ready, if not actually ready, with fiber. i am very familiar with a lot of the sites around here and what their "normal" 3G speeds are on legacy backhaul. some sites are still running at these slow speeds after being 3G accepted. others i'm getting fantastic speeds from, and during times when the sites are normally saturated. speeds that are above and beyond just having the voice T1's added to the pool. these sites i'm confident have had fiber hooked up to them even though LTE hasn't been lit up yet.

i'm fairly certain that backhaul has been run to most of the WDM sites. i just don't think the focus of the integration/acceptance crews that came through the past few weeks to get all the towers on NV was to hook up the backhaul as part of it. either that or there is some final piece that mediacom needed to do so it could be hooked up that they haven't done yet. i know the day after WDM got accepted i went around to collect 1x800 data and there was a mediacom truck at the marriott, could have been there for sprint, could have been for something else.

basically yes. obviously sites that are live with LTE have new backhaul in place. other sites that have only been 3G accepted may or may not have fiber backhaul in place/hooked up. some sites i've run speedtests at and gotten over 1 meg consistently, even up to over 2 megs sometimes. these sites have new fiber backhaul hooked up. if you do a speedtest and you still get crap speeds like you saw that means the old T1 backhaul is still in place. in ankeny by the walmart/target area there over lunchtime during the week you can barely use data. i was just there over lunch today and got 1.3meg down, aka it has fiber hooked up.

nope, we think it will be fairly soon, at least for the sites that have fiber ready. but no one knows for sure.

Awsome!!!!! Thank you!!!!

only 1 legacy site left in the entire central Iowa market!!!! everything else is running on Network Vision equipment as of today!

thanks for this! i marked this tower as 4G confirmed in our spreadsheet in the sponsor section and credited you!

yep looks like downtown got switched over last night! got the info from the two shots you posted added to the spreadsheet, thanks!