bmoses

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.

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?

at that intersection you would most likely be connected to the merle hay tower (i posted some pictures of it in this thread). That tower is always hit or miss if data is good. sometimes i can get around 1 meg down from it, other times i can barely get anything to work. as soon as it gets converted to NV it will be all good though

found another tower over lunch thats getting fiber run to it its by lower beaver and the interstate. so far i've only seen backhaul and GMO work being done. still waiting for the day i stop by a tower and there is a nice new bundle of equipment sitting there ready to be installed

thanks for the pics! i'm no expert but i believe sprint is on the top rack of the tower with 3 racks. also i don't see any signs of new equipment yet. Keep an eye on it though and let us know if you see anything new show up! i posted a few pics in this thread of what the new base cabinets look like so thats what you will want to watch for.

there isn't an easy way no. So far all the accepted towers in the East Iowa market have been GMO sites. full build sites are starting though. to see if work is currently going on you would need to visit each tower and see if there is any signs of work. Otherwise you would have to wait until Robert receives an acceptance report on it and it shows up on the sites complete map.

lol, was just going to reply that it looked like you were comparing to the sites complete map the network.sprint.com site includes upgrades to legacy equipment too, its not just for NV upgrades even though it can include those as well. upgrades to legacy sites include additional T1 lines, and extra carriers to allow more voice and data users at the same time. the only way to tell if an upgrade on network.sprint.com is NV related is to check the sites complete map here and see if Robert has received an acceptance report on it and adds it to the map.

did you count the number of pins on network.sprint.com or look at the total number of upgrades? i just compared the sponsor map to the sprint one and the sponsor map shows more "pins" than the sprint one.

yep one of those is a sprint tower, not sure which one as i can't tell from google maps. i'm not sure about all of the carriers, but several years ago sprint sold all of its towers to different tower companies and then leases them back from them. if you get a chance to go back out there and take some pics of the base cabinets and also the panels up on the tower and post them, we can see if we can tell which set is sprints and if there is any new equipment delivered/installed yet or not

stopped by the GMO site that had SBA workers at it the other day that i talked to and took some pictures of their finished work. There were 3 RRUs mounted and the cabinets with the new equipment were powered up and running. All thats left at this site is new backhaul and someone to come out and cut over to the new equipment from the legacy.

went there over lunch today and grabbed some pics of the equipment on the roof for the merle hay tower. and a google maps view of the building since sprint is on the building and there are 4 carriers on the 2 towers outside the mall i'm guessing they are verizon, at&t, tmobile, and us cellular.

neither of the two towers outside of Merle Hay have sprint on them. sprint is on the hotel that's attached to the mall there.

thanks for the additional info. i wonder why sprint would contract them to do NV work outside of the 3 OEMs? that seems kind of odd..... i did check out SBAs site map, just focusing on the des moines area, and it doesn't look like SBA has very many sprint sites around here. they only had 1 of the 2 GMO sites i know are in progress. they also had a full build site that's getting fiber run to it this week. Otherwise there was only a handful of other sites that they owned that sprint was on.

Stopped by a GMO site after work today. There were workers there so i got to talk to one for a bit. He said they were with SBA, which is who owned the tower, and they were there hooking up all the equipment, new 3G and the 4G equipment. i asked him if he knew what backhaul they were using at that tower and if it had been hooked up and he had no idea, sounds like someone else will come out to hook up backhaul if/when its ready. he also made it sound like someone else would be along to actually cut over to the new equipment they were hooking up at some later date, whenever whoever makes that decision, decides. There were 4 of them there working and he said it takes them about 6-8 hours to do their part hooking up all the equipment at a GMO site. as to other sites, he said they mainly just work on SBA sites, sometimes they get contracted through Optimus(?) and will work on other companies towers. I asked him if he knew anything about full build sites and he said they were going to one tomorrow! but then i asked him where and he said he didn't know one of the other guys said it was back east somewhere, so no idea if its even in iowa. sounds like they get sent all over the midwest, so the full build they are going to could be anywhere. and thats all i found out so no LTE from this site until backhaul and someone comes out and hooks it up and switches everything over to the new equipment

well there are two ways to find out, the easy way and the hard way. The easy way is to become a sponsor and you will have access to the sites complete and sites in progress maps, here is info on becoming a sponsor. the hard way is visiting towers that you think might be upgraded and seeing if you see any new equipment installed

it could very well be them working on the towers, when NV work is going on people have lots of problems with their service. It could also just be an outage too, only way to know for sure is check the sponsors map to find the locations of the towers and go check them out and see if there are any workers there

also forgot to add i drove by another tower this weekend that has the ground all flagged and painted so it looks like they are getting ready to run new backhaul to it too! so they are definitely going full steam ahead getting backhaul in place, hopefully that means tower work on full build sites will be starting soon!

there is a map of all the wimax protection sites on the sponsor area, the one at beaver and douglas, that's supposed to be torn down, is a wimax site. there are 2 others in des moines, one across from sam's club/walmart on the towers by the football field, and another one next to the university ave exit off of I-235

woot! here's hoping central iowa starts at the same time

well according to the maps in the sponsor section that is not a sprint tower. there is a sprint tower marked about 1-2 blocks south west of the tower you pointed out there, so they either relocated that tower and it wasn't updated in the data Robert received, or its another carrier that's doing work. The only other carrier i can think of that would be doing work around here, that would involve adding new panels, is T-mobile adding LTE to the tower. all other carriers in this area already have LTE up and running. If you stop by there again and see workers out there stop and ask them who they are doing work for and let us know! side note: the building marked as being the sprint tower on the maps i'm not seeing any panels anywhere on it in google maps, so i'm either blind, or its been relocated, or the location is wrong

i don't agree, even though this is a "sprint 4g update" site this topic is in the "general topics" section and even though its not about cellular things it doesn't mean that as a community we can't discuss other things going on.

good, maybe that will force verizon and at&t to allow LTE roaming too...... who am i kidding, that's never going to happen

well both the winterset towers are listed as GMO towers so its possible they could have LTE if they have had work done already, but since they are GMO they would not have new panels installed and i don't see any RRU's up top where the panels are. its hard to tell from the pics if new cabinets have been installed, can you get a better angle and see if any cabinets look like these? those are from two other GMO towers around me. also if they do have everything installed there would be a rack near the new cabinets that would have the RRU's mounted to it. I don't have a pic of what they look like as none of the GMO towers i've been too have the RRU's installed yet. also any signs of fiber being trenched recently? would need that in order for LTE to get turned on too.

All GMO sites are supposed to get LTE assuming new backhaul can be secured. it may not be active right away depending on many factors but at some point it should be. AFAIK there is only 1 Samsung GMO site with LTE active, i don't know if its just cause they are still testing or what. the only thing GMO sites won't get right away is new panels for 800Mhz support, sometime next year they will revisit GMO sites and convert most of them to full build sites. my brother lives in huxley and that town is covered by a GMO site that's in progress now. i have him checking every so often to see if he picks up a 4G signal and will report it here once he does