bmoses

I'm hearing Sprint is trying to have things ready for our state fair (biggest one in the country). I'm not so sure that will happen at the rate they are going.

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.....

stopped by the tower, there wasn't anyone there anymore. Not sure what they did there either as there was no equipment and nothing looked like it had changed, lock was undone from the gate though.

 

also stopped by the tower at 86th and aurora and there were workers there!!!

 

so close!!!!

stopped by this tower again, no one there today, so i drove up to it and peaked in the fence, no signs of any new equipment or work, so not sure what these guys did while there or if it was even for sprint.

here are some pics i took of ground mount RRUs from a GMO site, feel free to add them if you want.

http://i1102.photobucket.com/albums/g442/bradmoses/Sprint%20Towers/IMG_5229CR2.jpg

http://i1102.photobucket.com/albums/g442/bradmoses/Sprint%20Towers/IMG_5228CR2.jpg

http://i1102.photobucket.com/albums/g442/bradmoses/Sprint%20Towers/IMG_5227CR2.jpg

http://i1102.photobucket.com/albums/g442/bradmoses/Sprint%20Towers/IMG_5225CR2.jpg

http://i1102.photobucket.com/albums/g442/bradmoses/Sprint%20Towers/IMG_5224CR2.jpg

I wonder what they were doing, yeah they were there for maybe an hour. Is there room in those closets to store servers and antennas ?

i can't imagine there is much room in the building at that site, plus all the nextel equipment should still be in there. unless he was arriving with an empty trailer and was removing nextel equipment from the building and they are planning on putting the sprint NV equipment in the building? the legacy equipment at that location is sitting outside on the cement pad right now, usually they put the new equipment outside right next to it, but with nextel going away and this being a nextel/sprint site i guess its possible they could be utilizing the building instead.

either way he had to have been doing something for sprint since its a sprint/nextel site, so its good news regardless

Anyone have an idea what the closest tower is downtown on Grand/Ingersol? Any permit info for those towers?

you can find permit activity for des moines here. also if you become a sponsor you can get access to the iowa/nebraska thread that has a map of all the sprint towers, i've also been posting permits and other activity i've been finding in that thread. the only way to post what tower is closest to that location in this thread is if someone goes out and finds the tower and confirms its sprints and posts it. otherwise we would be posting about sponsor only information and that wouldn't be allowed.

stopped by the tower, there wasn't anyone there anymore. Not sure what they did there either as there was no equipment and nothing looked like it had changed, lock was undone from the gate though.

also stopped by the tower at 86th and aurora and there were workers there!!!

so close!!!!

I'm seeing activity at the Hickman tower. There's a truck there with a trailer. I'm thinking they may be delivering equipment, it's a small trailer though.

woot!!!!! guess i know what i'm doing over lunch!!!

Anything new going on in Des Moines ? Still no activity as far as equipment being delivered to the tower they ran fiber to at Hickman and MLK. I will be sure and let you guys know when I see it coming in.

found this morning that this tower had a permit issued on 05/03, along with 6 other towers in des moines hopefully that means work will start soon!!!!

I probably shouldn't even repeat this because it is most likely highly inaccurate but in case someone else hears the same thing it can be considered already addressed

my mother in law was in a sprint store the other day looking at phones to upgrade to (old people and phones makes me want to /suicide, but thats another story) and the sales reps told her that the network upgrades would be done by the state fair...... (mid august-ish for those not from iowa reading this)

again, as most of us know the sales reps are the last to know what is going on so take this as a huge grain of salt. if anything we will have some LTE coverage by mid august, but being completely done, probably not going to happen.

and in other news, found some more towers with fiber work being done but still no equipment deliveries or tower work being done yet. good thing i guess is that when they do start waiting on backhaul shouldn't happen

Has anyone in the Omaha area noticed their data connections dropping out in places that it had worked in the past?  I can't get anything around Village Pointe (which has had issues for about 6 months) and then barely 1X speeds on 132nd from Dodge to Maple.  Hopefully it is because they are upgrading the current towers, but it is data speeds like this that are making me want to dump Sprint recently.

I've noticed it not being there lol. But did have a weird thing happen last night. I set by phone down and the signal would slowly go up from zero bars to full bars, then back down to zero. It would keep doing it.

 

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From what I've read from other market threads that are being deployed this is an unfortunate side affect of upgrading the network. you are going to have dropped calls, no data connection, and delayed texts until they get closer to being done with your area.

If you take avenue of the saints after you get through Waterloo it goes to 1xrtt. I found a lot of areas where the voice network just didn't work even being next to the towers. Sometimes it wouldn't go through and other times it would go through but would be so choppy it was pointless. It is like the equipment is barely functioning. I didn't stop and look at any of the towers but I would imagine the equipment is rather old and takes up large amounts of space. I have had 3G in SE Iowa in the past so maybe a bit of work is taking place.

i went back and checked the sponsors map and every tower along the route i took is a GMO site and has been 3G accepted already. so obviously even though its been accepted they haven't switched over to the new equipment yet for some reason. I was also looking at this thread and it lists the east iowa market at being 50% complete on 3G accepted sites! i wonder what the hold up is on getting them turned on/switched over to the new NV equipment.....

Did do the 'airplane mode' trick and then ran a speedtest when I got home. I got 1630kbps down and 588kbps up (one of these days I'll be concerned with taking a snapshot) but only had 2 bars of connectivity.    Could they have changed the angle of the antennas such that I no longer get strong voice signal?   Just seems odd that we had full bars not too long ago and now only have two.

bars on your phone only show you your voice signal. also your phone can be connected to 1 tower for voice and another tower for data, but the bars will only show you the voice tower. 3G can also have good data speeds with a low signal strength as long as its a "clean" signal. so in your case either your voice and data were on different towers, or they were on the same tower and just happen to get a good speed test too. it could be that the closer tower is still being worked on and only accepting data connections which would give you the good speed, but your signal seemed low cause it was on a further away tower for voice.

really there are so many factors that can affect everything on a normal basis that it will drive you crazy trying to figure out what is going on, plus throw in that they are actively deploying and things will change from day to day based on that, it will just compound things even further. 

I'm excited for some of the 1xrtt towers in Iowa to finally see some upgrades. Those seem to be mixed among the central and eastern market. I was one some of those towers in the eastern market and had trouble just getting voice calls to go through. Things along the 35 corridor were okay until I started getting close to the MN border then things went downhill fast. The network is having issues with both data and voice.

no joke, i just posted in another thread that i went to st louis this week and almost the whole route through south east iowa was 1X instead of 3G. same thing going to MN, get past ames and you lose 3G again until MN.

Something is going on because when the site closest to my house was 3G accepted, the download speeds on 3G were in the 1.5Mbps range and the connectivity was 4 bars.   As I sit right now, I barely have 2 bars and the download speeds on 3G are in the 400kbps range.    

they either took the 3G accepted tower thats closest to you offline to work on it, forcing your phone to connect to a tower further away with no upgrades, or you phone connected to a tower further away that has no upgrades and is just holding onto that connection instead of switching to the closer tower. best way to test would be to turn on airplane mode for 30 seconds then turn it off. that will force your phone to scan towers again. if the one closest to you is live it will pick it back up, if its not you will go back to the further away tower.

Today I wrote on the Sprint facebook complaining about how slow my 3G services have been as lately (found out there was outages) but also found out some news that a few of us will be happy about! So if what the sprint rep says is true it sounds like they are going to be starting 4g installation soon. I live on the east side of Des Moines 50317.photo.PNG

yep its coming, we don't know when for sure but we should start seeing 4G go live over the summer here. i've found several towers myself that have had new backhaul run to them, still waiting on new equipment to be delivered and installed though.

I would think July would be pushing it.  A quick speedtest just showed a 236ms ping time and 126kbps down/ 258kbps up on a 3g connection.  I'm up in Hiawatha at the present time.   We'll see though.

I know but a rep said july 10th is the day they'll turnit on in our area

That would be awesome.

don't believe any dates a rep says, they unfortunately don't have any concrete info. you will get more accurate info from this site then you will sprint reps. 4G/LTE will go live on towers as they get installed and accepted by sprint, there won't be any date that they all get "turned on". there are a ton of GMO sites that are 3G accepted in the east iowa market now and i've found at least a handful of full build sites that have been 3G accepted. So work is happening all over the east iowa market, its just a matter of time and patience right now for when those first 4G towers go live, could be tomorrow could be 6-8 weeks from now. no one knows for sure but it is happening.

speaking of the east iowa market. went from des moines area to st Louis yesterday via 163/34/27 highways and i was on 1x data more than i was on 3G this was even passing some areas that have been accepted 3G complete, so they must not have brought them online yet. didn't pick up any 4G anywhere and was on the west side of the st Louis area and nothing there either. so that area will have a huge shock when they go from 1x to 4G after they get done upgrading the network

Update from Winterset, Iowa site looks like they ran fiber optics got a chance at looking at one of the boxes that was open.

 

 

*snip*

very nice! you are even closer to having that new NV equipment fired up and getting some LTE goodness! i'm still waiting for the couple of GMO sites i've seen around here get backhaul installed. All the equipment is there, just need backhaul and then have it hooked up and switched over.

Still thinking of making the switch. I have one more day to do it. Otherwise I need to wait until end of next month. Is .2 and .3 good enough for navigation? My bill would only be $75 or so a month, which is really hard to beat. Really hard.

until NV gets done its going to be inconsistent and all over the place. at my work some days i pull 700k-1meg down and other days i can barely get 100k-200k. so if you can handle data speeds being all over the place until NV gets done then go for it. but if those times/days data sucks and you can't do anything are going to piss you off then you will probably want to wait until NV gets done.

Anything new going on in Des Moines ? Still no activity as far as equipment being delivered to the tower they ran fiber to at Hickman and MLK. I will be sure and let you guys know when I see it coming in.

nothing new yet, still just backhaul getting installed at sites. I haven't seen any equipment show up at the sites i've visited yet, other than GMO sites. i'm thinking we are still a good 4 weeks or so away from tower work starting. I'm guessing they want to get as much backhaul in place first so when they start tower work they don't have to wait around on backhaul to get done.

Hmm that's interesting. I didnt know that. I work at Centurylink in the MOE group doing fiber to the cell and sprint doesnt have anything going on that way. I'm assuming they are going to feed the LTE via T1/T3s.

interesting, maybe sprint isn't using centurylink for their fiber? i don't know how all those things work but i have witnessed that orange tubing they use to bury fiber in being run to a few sites over the past few weeks.

all NV towers are being upgraded to either fiber, microwave, or some form of AAV for backhaul. I don't know the requirements but from other things i've read it sounds like it needs to be at least 40meg down (a site robert ran into was using bonded DSL) and be easily expandable if more bandwidth is required.

So any news? I'm trying out Tmobile prepaid here in Des Moines. I work downtown and Sprint's data is pretty bad. I'd like to see this get fixed in the next 60 days. Sounds like from the thread that it's possible.

no concrete news. basically backhaul is getting installed at the sites right now and at some point in the next few months they will start installing the equipment on the towers. Once that starts happening and the new equipment goes live you will start the notice improvements on a site by site basis. I'm guessing 2-3 months for the first accepted sites to show up and then a good 6-8 months before the whole area is complete.

Shouldn't you be "working" at work rather than streaming videos?

i'm an excellent multi tasker

unlimited data and no throttling for me!!!!!!! this was a not normal case but i was in dallas last fall on a business trip and ended up getting sick so spent the whole day in my hotel room streaming tv shows from my server at home. was my first time on LTE and ended up using a little over 30 gig once lte gets installed around here i can see myself using 15-20 gig per month. i use my phone a lot at work, where i can't wifi offload, to browse the internet and, once i have faster data speeds, stream videos.

In my mind, it makes sense to do both LTE 1900 and LTE 800 at the same time after iDEN shutdown and the conclusion of LTE 800 FIT's. So that's what I would do. However, I have not received any info about that is what is being done.

 

Robert via Nexus 7 with Tapatalk HD

makes sense to me to, saves money on a return tower trip. i was just curious as 4 of my family on sprint have upgrades in 22 days and i'm trying to decide how to advise them if it would be worth waiting for phones with lte 800 if lte 800 is getting installed right away with the upgrades happening around us. none of them are heavy data users so in the end it probably doesn't matter, just like to give people as much info as possible

so with iden shutdown in june and lte 800 in the next 3 months would the chances be good that markets like mine, that are just getting underway, get lte 800 off the bat? or will they still only do the initial 3 install types and then come back later and do lte 800?