bmoses

If Sprint's engineering department doesn't know to prioritize a site that is on the heaviest traveled interstate highway in Eastern Iowa and one of the top traveled interstate highways in the United States they have bigger problems than I can help them with.

 

That said, I've had my iWireless SIM in the whole last week, haven't used Sprint once.  Been nice to constantly see LTE everywhere I go for the last week as opposed to sitting on EVDO 80+% of the time.  I may bite the bullet and drop Sprint and go from $25/mo Framily to $35/mo megatalk LTE.

i feel your pain  same story with the huxley GMO tower, giant LTE hole along interstate 35, and not only that but in between 2 major metro areas. all other towers along I-35 have LTE but this one. just doesn't make sense. and i've contacted them multiple times about the tower and its always the same story "no plans to upgrade at this time" I even sent an email to Kevin Crull who is the president over the central region and all he did was forward my email on to Marci's team.....

i bought a $46 android phone from best buy with a t-mobile SIM yesterday and have been using it to check out iwireless signal and speeds (you can run speed tests on t-mobile without having any kind of a data plan  ). so far i've been impressed with what i've seen and their tower density is insane so far in the few places i've checked out. i'll use the phone to see when LTE is on in huxley from them and also check out how the signal is up there and if its good enough my 7 lines on our own Framily plan will most likely be switching as well  

Send me site ID, I will request for nfo.

thanks, i'll shoot you a message tomorrow with all the info i have!

how were you able to confirm?

1 of the towers is a sprint only site and had the orange buried fiber marker installed about a year after getting NV equipment installed. then another year later all the sudden EVDO speeds shot up way faster than they were before. I reached out to some sprint employees through reddit that confirmed in the system the sites were now showing as having ethernet for backhaul.

Are you counting the spectrum that iwireless got when they took over T-Mobiles network in Des Moines?

as far as i know yes, everything i could find made it sound like they only had enough spectrum for a 10x10 in AWS in the des moines areas (maybe up to a 15x15 down the road). in other areas it was the same story except it was PCS instead of AWS.

Yeah I am on framily too (line 8 and 9) which makes it hard to switch. 14 days of iwireless for free though to test made it noce. For me coverage on 380 is near critical since I am often stuck on long Google hangouts while driving home. iwireless is solid the whole way where as Sprint switches to EVDO for half the drive

Iwireless here in the QC is a mixed bag...I know a lot of people who has or had them and most of those people have switched to Boost Mobile. I know things got real rough when they were upgrading their network to LTE. As of now I'm not sure of their service here now that their upgrades should be complete in the area

thanks for the iWireless info/opinions my 3 main concerns with iWireless were 1) they only have AWS for LTE, which means poor in building coverage - UNLESS they densify their network properly and 2) i've not experienced it myself but i've heard GSM voice quality is not very good - coming from sprint who really does have awesome voice quality this could be a negative too. 3) back to only having AWS for LTE, it sounds like they are stuck with a 10x10 (maybe a 15x15 down the road) so it could become strained and lead to poor speeds - counters to this would be since they are a local carrier their user base should be lower so not as many users and if they have enough tower density they could overcome this.

No kidding very frustrating to spend most my day on EVDO when all the sites have upgraded to Ethernet backhaul. I am testing iwireless lte and can say they have eclipsed Sprints LTE buildout in eastern Iowa, I rarely drop LTE now.

i've been tempted to try out iWireless as they just launched LTE in des moines in december. but i really need their future LTE coverage between des moines and ames to be done in order for my whole family to switch. now with this news of the spectrum swap i'm torn on what to do....... this will help sprint out a lot in the metros but their stupid GMO towers still affect the rest of my family, plus i'm on my own 7 line framily plan and i would lose that if we switched and decided iWireless wasn't very good

Yeah I knew it was SpeedConnect, I just got done reading an article about Lightsquared and had a blond moment...anyhow, with a 15x15 block of band 25, would that boost speeds as well as capacity or just add capacity?

it would increase max speed as well as capacity. you can think about it like this. if those were 3 separate 5x5 carriers they would each run about 35mbps for a max speed, but you would have 3 of them to spread people out over, so speeds would be good but you would never go over 35. if you combine them all together into a 15x15 you have the same amount of capacity but the max speed is now ~105mbps because you are connecting to 15 Mhz at a time instead of just 5 (on the downlink)

It's usable, except for the south end of Cedar Rapids by the airport... where they still haven't added LTE on the Swisher exit site. My friend who works for Sprint confirmed for me that site is ethernet fed so no one really knows why they haven't done any sort of GMO LTE upgrade at the least for that site.  

^^^^^^^ apply that last statement to most of iowa too.... i've confirmed on several GMOs around me that they are on ethernet and its being used yet no full build upgrades/LTE from them.

Thank you bmoses...just to be sure, I'm talking about the Quad Cities area.

yep, and anywhere they are putting a 2nd carrier its been a 5x5. there are a few cases of a 10x10 B25 carrier out there but only in locations they acquired the C block, then they can just expand the original 5x5 G block carrier to a 10x10, they are also adding a 5x5 in the B block in those locations too.

I wasn't aware of a second carrier on band 25 in the area. Are they 5x5 or 10x10 blocks? Also,would any tri-band phone be able to pick up the additional carrier?

the 2nd B25 carrier is also a 5x5 block, so you would have 2 5x5 blocks each capable of a max of around 37 meg down, so wouldn't double max speeds, just have more capacity to split users between. any sprint LTE phone can pick up the 2nd carrier since all sprint phones started out with PCS B25/2 support. all they are doing for the 2nd carrier is reducing the # of 3G carriers available and refarming them to LTE, so same spectrum, different technology.

i hope this ends up being really good! i have the flex 2 right now and my yearly framily upgrade is in march. i really wanted the nexus 6p but since i can't get it through sprint on easy pay it isn't an option for the yearly upgrade thing. i'm kind of disappointed with the options available.... i don't like touchwiz so i stay away from samsung, HTC doesn't have a new phone over 5" screen, not an apple fan, and can't get nexus phones through sprint. so that just leaves me with LG, hope they come through!

http://m.imgur.com/XtVNRXO,W17qXt5

 

These popped up in my feed from some crews working, I think the rollout may be getting srsbzns finally.

 

Captioned 'just a couple sprint sites."

 

Indeed.

they guy posted back, it was just leftover equipment from the 65mhtz project in Ericsson land

They're trying to deploy 10x10 using 1700 (4) and 1900 (2). Their spectrum holdings vary a bit depending on the part of Iowa so it isn't going to be universally standard.

Band 2 is a subset of band 25 so in the theoretical sense, Sprint could roam on that. In reality, I don't see it happening. T-Mobile still owns 50% of iWireless. 1) It is still unclear whether even their own customers can access iWireless 2) They have no incentive to help Sprint 3) Us Cellular other than extreme Northwestern Iowa already provides Sprint LTE roaming in virtually the entire state.

in regards to the cell phones, i was meaning that from the point of view of possibly being able to take a sprint phone and use it on iWireless if i were to switch. i wasn't meaning being able to roam on iwireless while still on sprint.

Doesn't TMobile roam on them now free and clear over LTE? Might be better with that? What about USCC, too expensive?

 

But then Sprint roams on USCC there now if your roaming bucket is large enough for your needs.

iWireless roams on T-Mobile LTE for free and adheres to whatever plan you have. I don't know that T-Mobile customers can roam on iWireless LTE though. one of my coworkers has T-Mobile and i checked his phone yesterday and he was connected to W-CDMA according to signal check pro yet we have a closer iWireless tower than a T-Mobile tower. i believe he has a galaxy S4 so not sure if that was the issue or if T-Mobile just can't get on iWireless LTE.

USCC thinks they are AT&T or Verizon and so they are way too expensive and don't have an unlimited option.

Notice these black dots are appearing in Albuquerque with the latest update. Anyone know what these mean?

 

i looked at my area and have both dot and squares, they seem to line up and are labeled as local places. like shopping malls, sports complex, etc.

well surprisingly wikipedia seems to have a lot of information on them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWireless

now i just need to find exactly what frequencies they have. looks like maybe even most newer sprint phones would work on their network assuming they allowed that?

Heard on the radio this morning an advertisement for iWireless for their 4G LTE network. I don't know the exact relationship but they are listed as a T-Mobile affiliate, however I know they have been deploying their own LTE network and it sounds like its finally live.

does anyone know, or can point me in the right direction to find out, what they are using for frequency and channel width for their LTE?

I'm considering at least doing their test drive as they installed a tower just up the road from my work and it would hopefully be able to give me better service than sprint does at my work. i'm not sure if i would actually switch though because their phone selection isn't the best and i'm on a 7 member framily plan on sprint where all 7 members are actual family and it would suck losing that plan!

just trying to find some more technical info about them so i can be better informed

thanks to the huxley tower being a GMO and providing terrible service to huxley i was able to get connected to USCC LTE today got connected to both B12 and B5 on my Flex 2. sorry no SCP screen shots as it was doing the 1x/LTE bug and if i would have airplane mode i would have lost LTE.

i've been noticing that a lot in the reports where sprint did really well yet didn't win as many awards. the only think i could come up with is rootmetrics is putting a lot of weight on the upload speed and so thats what is preventing sprint from wining the awards

Ok I am going bananas here...for the last 2 weeks this tower in Ames has not been right.  Every 30 minutes or so it will completely drop LTE data with LTE connection remaining strong.  My 6P will just sit and spin....then about 5 minutes later it starts to work again.  Almost as if the tower itself rebooted or something.  Anyone know if they are working on this tower or should I contact Sprint?

 

contact sprint. there aren't any upgrades happening right now so its most likely a tower issue.

yeah i didn't figure it would work, was just throwing that out there.

my coworker will be at his parents house this weekend in NW iowa where there is zero sprint service but plenty of USCC LTE, he has a nexus 5, i'll have him check and see if he gets any LTE while he is up there.

at my work we don't have sprint LTE in my building unless we use a booster, but there is a US Celluar tower just up the road that reaches in here fine. I just did a non-scientific test of going to where i don't have sprint LTE and doing airplane mode but it would only connect to sprint 3G. i do have LTE roaming on and the non-sprint bands set to higher priority on my phone. 

looks like a ZV9 update is out, my phone just prompted me to update to it

Version

Release Date

Description of Enhancements/Fixes

• Sprint Global Roaming
• Minor UI Updates
• App Updates
• Bug Fixes

a lot of us at my work have to use the wilson sleek because our building is made of metal and is killer on signal. even though its not meant for B25 or B26 it does work on them. In the past few days a 2nd B25 carrier has gone live in my area, which does fall within the frequencies the sleek works on, and you can tell that its doing a better job at boosting that frequency. I get about 5db better signal from the 2nd B25 carrier from the same tower.

we did attempt a "room" type booster at one point, i'm not sure if its because it was a cheap no-name brand from china, or if it just wasn't designed for B25 frequencies so it didn't boost them at all, but it was crap. we basically had to be within a few feet of the antenna to get any kind of signal gains, and then the signal would be really strong but there was so much noise at that point either data wouldn't work or our phones would get kicked off of LTE. 

hopefully you have good luck! based on using the sleek it should be doable, just not sure why my attempt at a room one failed, maybe you will have better luck getting a more reputable brand, we were trying to go cheap so it was less than $200 for the booster and 2 antennas.....

is beamforming only applicable to B41? or can the B25/B26 panels beamform as well?