bmoses

yeah that was inadvertently my point, the sales people in the stores are telling people that 4G will be here by the fair, but going off of what has actually happened for things getting upgraded in other markets there is no guarantee that 1) 4G will be covering the fair grounds by the fair and 2) 4G will even be here by then since i haven't seen a single tower start upgrades yet. the OEMs don't focus on particular areas or populations or anything. They are upgrading every tower so they do them as they are ready (backhaul, permits, etc) not by any particular order.

the sales people told my mother in law that when she was in looking at phone upgrades last week, that 4G would be here by the fair. not that sales people are purposefully dishonest or trying to mislead but they are usually the last ones to know anything. I'm sure there will be some 4G live by then but i doubt they will be done. especially since i have seen zero tower work yet, and i've checked a lot of towers, and the fair is 2 months away..... well we are about 4 weeks out from the start of the fair, if they are wanting to have some 4G live by then they better get their rears in gear as i have still seen 0 activity..... i haven't checked any towers by the fair grounds but i can't imagine they would focus on those first as that hasn't been their MO in any other market.....

did you have sensorly running the whole time and were you using the LTE discovery app? i ask because its been seen that if there is an active data connection and you are on 3G your phone will not switch to 4G even if its there. having sensorly running would count as an active data connection. if you swing past there again make sure to at least do airplane mode to force your phone to scan for 4G. then if you get 4G fire up sensorly

hmmmmm...... looks like this will end up being more for me in, not by much though. Currently i have the 1500 minute family plan with 4 lines and the 3000 minute family plan with 5 lines with an 18% discount on the first line of each plan, all are smartphones so before taxes and fees my total is 443.13. with these new plans, assuming i'm calculating the discount correctly it would be 50+40+30+20*6 = 240 30*.82*9 = 221.40 for a total of $461.40 which is $18.27 more than I'm currently paying. if i add back in the taxes and fees my current total per line is $54.38, the new amount per line would be $56.54. So while it would suck that prices are going up its not enough to cause us to want to switch, i'd rather have unlimited data with the better coverage of sprint than switch to tmobile, and us-cellular would still be more per line.

how are you supposed to read the cost per line? so like for 4 lines would it be 50+40+30+20=140? or if you got two lines they would each be 40, 3 lines they would each be 30, and 4-10 lines they would each be 20? so 4 lines would be 80?

so over the past 2 days i've driven or stopped by 17 towers, out of those 17 towers i didn't see any new equipment and only saw work being done on 1. the one tower that did have work being done to it was the clive water tower, which has multiple carriers on it. i'm assuming it is not for sprint since none of the other towers i visited had any signs of work. i drove by it a few weeks ago and there were people there setting up scaffolding and stuff and the equipment on the ground made me think that they were getting ready to repaint the water tower. however when i drove by today i was surprised to see that a, presumably, temporary tower had been erected (it was not a COW as it was fixed into a concrete base on the ground). [/url] so i'm not sure whats going on there, 3 possibilities i can think of are 1) its another carrier upgrading and they setup a temp tower while work was being done. 2) water tower is being painted and they are moving everything to the temp tower until painting is done 3) it is sprint work being done and they setup a temp tower for the time being. if anyone has any ideas on what panels could be on the temp tower let me know!

i know its a sprint only tower, but would be nice to hear from someone that may know whats going on. Unless equipment was delivered today there isn't any there, i just went to that tower yesterday and there was nothing.

you should go over and ask them if they are there for sprint work or know anything about work starting around here

there are 4 towers in ankeny, i've seen permits issued for 3 of the 4 so far. the first one you list there on tradition dr is the one off state street south of oralabor. the other carrier on that tower is t-mobile, which is the top set of antennas, sprint is the bottom set. kind of depressing it was issued back in february there is another tower right behind the corporate sprint store on Delaware next to walmart, that's a sprint only tower. it had a permit issued in march or may. then the other one you list there is the water tower off first street next to the fire station, as far as i could tell from base cabinets there is only sprint on that one too. then the last tower is the "flag/mono pole" one behind burger king, i haven't seen a permit for that one yet. i did stop by that one and it looked like there were 2 carriers on it based on base cabinets, so its possible the crane you saw was for someone else depending on who the other carrier is.

just go to each cities website and look at their monthly permit reports. I've saved a list of the ones i use i'll paste here if you want to take a look yourself. sometimes they are obviously for sprint, other times the only way i know its for sprint is by confirming there is a sprint tower in the same location using the sponsor map here.

The permits list the address of the site on them. So I put that in Google maps. The sponsor section has a map of all sprint towers so then I zoom in on the same area and see if there is a pin in the same spot as the address I entered. Sponsor section also has a map of all upgrades that have been completed so far.

i've been on vacation for the past 2 weeks, going to try and go out today or tomorrow and hit some towers to see if there is anything new going on. The few I have seen since being back don't show any signs of work yet so i'm not optimistic. i did check on permits for the month of June and there were 9 more issued for des moines and 1 more for ankeny. that brings the total number of permits issued to about 30 that i've seen. One weird thing was most of the permits i've seen so far list something like "adding 3 new antennas to existing tower" but 2 of the permits for june said they were adding 5 new antennas and one said 6. i confirmed there were all sprint tower locations and they were from optima network services which most of the other permits for sprint sites have been from. anyone have any guesses on what the additional antennas could be for?

so i was doing my monthly check for permits in the des moines area and i came across this permit.... BLD2013-00979 Builder VINCO, INC 18995 NORTH FOREST BLVD FOREST LAKE MN 55025 06/05/2013 3801 DEAN AVE Applicant NICOLE TALAK CROWN CASTLE CAHANSBURG PA 15317 Owner MICHAEL VANDE VOORT 19641 BIRDSLEY RD COUNCIL BLUFFS IA 51503-8157 $35,000.00 ISS ALT COM District/Parcel: 050/04058-000-000 Designer Case valuation: 35,000.00 Adding 1 antenna to existing tower (Light Squared - (L2) is the carrier name) LOT 46 ORP SEC 5-78-23 sorry for the formatting, it doesn't copy/paste well. the address for the tower is 3801 DEAN AVE, Des Moines, IA and as you can see from the description its to add 1 antenna to existing tower for Light Squared. I can't imagine there is another company out there that would be dealing with "antennas" that would be called light squared so i'm assuming its related to this?

Lol and we are opposite in central Iowa. Backhaul is getting installed but no workers to install equipment.

Would your very well trusted source happen to know anything about the hold up in central Iowa?

very nice! that would be a first for a lot of things, first 4G in iowa, and both towers that could possibly cover mechanicsville are GMO sites so that would be the first GMO site with 4G too!

no, this isn't anything like wimax. clearwire was doing the wimax rollout and they were poorly managed and didn't have enough funding. Sprint is doing their own NV update. every tower is getting upgraded, which means faster backhaul and LTE. i've personally seen fiber being run to many towers around here and have found permits pulled for the upgrades on a lot of them too, its happening, just a matter of when, not if.

he was hard to understand but the impression i got was that equipment and everything else was ready to go, just waiting on workers. not surprising though since every carrier is doing something to their network and i'm sure the workers travel all over and don't just stay in one area so getting them to the middle of no where iowa would be a pain.

you mean the tower across from this place? Al De Carlo Demolition Comore info‎ 260 Northeast 44th Avenue Des Moines, IA 50313 if that's the case i would say closer to Broadway and 2nd ave would be a better description. as to the workers being there, yes there were. I stopped by there today and talked to them, they were there working on AT&T, not sprint i posted about it in the sponsor section in the Iowa thread but since it wasn't sprint i didn't post it in this thread. The worker there said the rumor he heard was there was a shortage of workers and that's what was holding up sprint deployment in central Iowa, so take that for what you will.....

here is my best guess.... tmobile doesn't have as many LTE devices out there as sprint does. so if they were in an area still being built out there wouldn't be as many completed towers as there are towers, so more people are sharing less towers then if all the towers were upgraded. and since tmobile has less LTE devices out there, there are less people sharing fewer towers on tmobile than there were on sprint. which translates to faster speeds from tmobile than sprint. hope that makes sense.

sounds exciting = yes. actually exciting = probably not. i've seen several towers where there have been workers there and then have gone back to check the next day and there were no signs of any work done. i've seen a lot of towers getting fiber (8 so far), but no equipment deliveries or tower work yet

interesting info..... the place the call drops is almost exactly the county border between polk and story counties. so assuming this is some kind of NID boundary and that is what is causing the call drop will that change with NV getting installed? i always just assumed it was tower spacing at that location and 1900 not being able to reach far enough to handoff from tower to tower.

here is a post i made about it awhile back, its got a map with the tower locations and approximate location of the call dropping.

is the SID reported by CDMA field test accurate? (right now it says 4124) If so next time i'm connected to the tower they would be switching too i'll see if the SID is the same or not.

thanks, now i know what to tell my family members that are having dropped calls in that spot what then can expect when NV gets done around here