bmoses

I'm not putting up with this beast much longer. My contract is done in November. I'll evaluate it then, but I have little confidence anything will change. Paying nearly $170/month for 2 lines (with device insurance) and not being to reliably use data driven apps is nonsense. I've been with Sprint for 10+ yrs and it's always "soon" when it comes to the network.

 

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You very well could have a device issue too. I don't know what areas you frequent but I'm usually on the north and east sides of the metro and while speeds are never blazing fast in rarely in a situation where apps and data doesn't work or works so poorly that I notice it.

.8 SNR is pretty bad. Surprised you got the speed you did.

After I posted that it jumped to around a 2 SNR so signal check may not have updated yet.

just to add some more evidence on how much signal affects speeds. from the tower i connect to at work i'm currently on B25 sitting at a -105 signal, -16 RSRQ, and .8 SNR and i ran a speedtest and got 3.18 meg down. earlier i when i was out and about i was closer to the tower and had a -87 signa, -7 RSRQ, and around a 20 SNR and got 27 meg down. i've repeated this test enough to know the difference in speeds is all due to signal stats and not due to tower load.

what you are seeing seems pretty normal to me..... B26 is overloaded everywhere i go, B25 is hit or miss depending on signal, and of course wherever there is B41 is great. I just hit some towers over lunch and doing speedtests on B25 near the towers was 25+ meg down on every one of them. move away to a worse signal and speeds dropped to 10 meg or less. just the nature of the beast apparently.

Good to see B41 at WDW.  It wasn't there in June and I was pretty disappointed that Sprint has been dragging their feet so much at the theme parks.  I mean really?  Shouldn't that be the highest priority over ANY other central FL site?

i was at WDW the first 2 weeks of july and i had fantastic service at the parks! they had to have had some kind of DAS system as i was getting strong B25 signals all over the place, and in places where i was no where near a macro site. speeds were really good too, anytime i ran a speedtest i was getting around 10 meg down. the only time i had service issues was in lines of rides that were deep in building or underground.

I even picked up B41 along with CA at the travel and transport area and epcot, got 60+ meg down while connected to that.

I get -114 on B41 in my living room and get 20mb down. If I step outside I get 60mb down.

 

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that would be the difference between a 20 mhz pipe on B41 and a 5 mhz pipe on B25. plus B41 is using beamforming and what not that improves edge of cell performance.

Yes.  A -88 dBm signal is almost four times stronger than a -93 dBm signal.  Other factors besides RSRP -- such as RSRQ, SINR, and MIMO -- may have changed in that distance.  For a 5 MHz FDD band 25 carrier at 3 miles distance from the serving site, that should be cell edge, and 5 Mbps would be great speeds, honestly.

 

AJ

wow..... that just blows my mind that it really is that fragile. i would have thought you wouldn't start seeing 5 meg or less until -105 or worse. i assume the curve drops fast and then trails off from there? i ask because i'm sitting at -107 and 4.4SNR right now and just pulled 3 meg down. this is from the same tower that i was referencing in the above scenario. 

That is not lack of optimization.  That is always going to happen -- it is the nature of wireless.  Speeds will decline with distance.  You cannot, for example, have adequate signal to support 64QAM on the downlink everywhere.

 

For another example, you probably have a Wi-Fi router at home.  Walk around your house or property with SignalCheck Pro active, and watch how negotiated link speeds decline with distance and obstructions.  It is simply physics.

 

AJ

yeah i know that, but should distance kill speeds even if signal strengths remain close? i'm talking going from a -88 signal and getting 20+ meg down to a -93 signal and them dropping to less than 5 meg. and distance wise we are talking 1 mile from the tower vs 3 miles from the tower.

I know they aren't. It just seems like they "might" become one later this year from what I have read on this site and Reddit(Unofficial and speculative, I know). Whether it happens or not, it'd be nice for Sprint to optimize their towers. I know that the IC area is lower priority than a city like Des Moines or Cedar Rapids, but I know they will get it done and I have faith that they WILL be the #1 or #2 network in 18-24 months like Marcelo says!

amen to this! optimization needs to happen so bad around here (here being des moines)! and not just cranking up the power on B26 and optimizing it, B25 needs it too. i find places all over the metro (on B25) where running a speedtest near a tower nets a 20+ meg download yet going down the road a bit will drop you down to 5 meg or less. i'm convinced that the rootmetrics report speeds were more due to bad optimization affecting the results then they were from towers being overloaded.

https://twitter.com/marceloclaure/status/633605574966444032

long term customers can still get subsidized phones.

question, did the COW hurt the performance at the fair this year? could the new band 41 from the dean ave tower have covered the grounds if the COW would not have been present, perhaps over powering the band 41?  I ask because i was at the Wisconsin state fair this year (last Saturday) and north end of the fair had strong usable band 41, but the rest of the fair was covered by unusable very strong band 25/26.  My first though was sprint had a COW present that drowned out the usable band 41 with unusable band 25/26... I dont know if that was the case or if its even possible for a COW to do that, but that was my first thought.  

the macro tower that has B41 that is near the fairgrounds actually does a horrible job covering the fairgrounds. from what i can tell its because of its height in relation to the fairgrounds along with the fairgrounds being on the edge of 2 sectors. so with that being said no i don't think the COW was overpowering B41 from that tower as i doubt i would have picked up B41 in any other places than i did. I would say overall the COW helped the surrounding macro network not get killed by the fair, but the fair was killing the COW.

last year the COW was doing nothing for the fair because they didn't configure it correctly so it had eCSFB issues and wouldn't let any tri-band phones connect to it. 

At the fair now! The COW is only broadcasting B25 and B26 and is only sort of working. I was hoping they would have a tri band COW. I had decent speeds from it this morning but as the day has progressed they have gone down. However the south and east sides are getting coverage from the B41 they just added to the Dean ave tower. Speeds from it are great, getting over 30 meg down!

I'm getting between 20-25 mb down in the downtown area by the library...this has never ever been close. I'm using an iPhone 6. Speeds dropped for a while in the afternoon to around 3-4 mb so they might be testing or maybe congestion? Either way...WAY better than the last 7 yrs!

welcome to B41 being installed

i just confirmed last night that 1 of the 3 "downtown" towers is live with B41. 1 of others has it installed but not live yet and the 3rd hasn't been installed. not sure if they are planning on installing it on that one or not.

there are about 10 to 15 towers around the metro that got B41 installed in the past couple months, a little over half of them are live already.

got this from the west des moines Marriott tower, thats newly live with B41, tonight!

fastest i've ever seen from sprint in the des moines metro area!

sorry to bump an older thread here. been doing some more testing and observing to this situation and i'm convinced that its some kind of signal/interference issue that causes slow speeds at my work. i'm reporting that in the sprint zone app so hopefully they take a look at it but i have a thought/question to run by the experts.

so in this hypothetical situation lets say person A is the only one the tower/sector so they have the full bandwidth available to them. but because of the signal strength and SNR the max speedtest you can get is 5mbps down. then person B comes along and is right next to person A. they are they only people on the tower/sector and have the exact same signal stats. Will person A and person B share that 5mbps download bandwidth? Or would they each get their own 5mbps slice?

hopefully that makes sense and the reason i'm asking is we basically have this situation at my work. whenever i get close to the tower that covers us i get 20 to 27 meg download speeds, but back at work its usually 3 to 5 meg down. we have 5 people at my work on sprint and i was curious to know if we were all fighting eachother for that 3 to 5 meg down or not?

thanks!

Yeah, I'm really considering this phone. It's so hard to get me away from my iPhone, but I'm getting bored. I get bored with a phone after a few months, and I've done a ton of research on the G4, and it seems like it would work for me. I also want to see how a new Android will handle the Sprint network with reception and band switching, because the iPhone is absolutely terrible in those departments. Plus, I miss Signal Check Pro. [emoji6]

if you want to go flagship android phone on sprint it really is about the only option right now. all the samsung phones are suffering from lackluster RF and the One M9 is just a cluster right now. you could go with the Nexus 6 but you would miss out on CA then. So that leaves the G4 of the Flex 2. The flex 2 is night and day better than it was when it first released but i would pick the G4 over the flex 2 if i had the choice between the 2.

as far as iowa goes, any tower that has B25 LTE 99% most likely has B26 as well. there might be a few out there that haven't gotten fired up for some reason, but not many. des moines and ames are starting to get some B41 installed but i wouldn't call it a "roll out" they are putting it on sites on a case by case basis. there are still a lot of 3G only towers out there, especially east iowa market. that will most likely stay that way until they get caught up in major markets and find the time/money to come back and start converting them to add B25/B26.

assuming it is the apple carrier bundle as lilotimz posted, i don't think there is much you can do besides get a phone that isn't an iphone or wait until they eventually fix it, assuming they even do. i don't stay up on iphones much so i'm not sure on all of the details of the issue with it. i just know the carrier bundle is the modem firmware/software so would be in control of connections to the network.

my wife has an iphone 6 and in the des moines area she doesn't have any issues, or i should say she hasn't complained to me about having issues

How is NV (especially 800MHz LTE) coming along in the Iowa City area? Supposedly Sprint's coverage map has Iowa City/Coralville/North Liberty as mostly LTE, and Sensorly and Open Signal have little data, but I only rarely get LTE in town. I am stuck on EVDO for about 80-90% of the time. I have seen one or two towers come online with LTE, but rarely am able to connect to it. Is it network-related or my iPhone's fault?

i don't ever get to iowa city so i have no first hand experience, but just looking at the maps on what towers are in the area and what upgrades they have you should be on LTE 80-90% of the time, not the other way around. so i would say you have a device issue.

there are 8 towers in and around iowa city that i would consider "iowa city towers". all but 2 of those 8 have both B25 and B26 active for LTE so you should see LTE more than not, unless you happen to mostly be in the area of the 2 non LTE towers.

But aren't most (or all) of the GMO sites GMOs because of pretty much those same logistic, structural, municipal or technical reasons? So wouldn't that leave the GMOs in the same situation they're currently in?

some yes, but not all, just look at Iowa. I would say 90% of our GMO sites are that way just because they were low priority so someone decided to make them that way. heck most (all?) of the GMO sites around the des moines metro even have fiber already run to them, which helps out 3G speeds, but no signs of upgrading them to get LTE going.

I'm ridiculously close to that youth homes campus. Way closer than the other tower. I'm at NW 51st and NW Beaver, so I wonder why it's not grabbing that tower.

 

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i drive along nw beaver every day to work and i know exactly why you are seeing the lower beaver tower and not youth homes. trees, elevation, and sector direction. youth homes is higher elevated than where you are and lower beaver is pointing right in your direction but youth homes is not. that coupled with the trees killing the signal is why you are seeing the tower you are at the signal strengths you are

i have a similar issue at my house. i'm really close to the tower in grimes (1/2 ish mile away) but i get crap signal from it in my house cause i'm on the edge of a sector

Got this sitting in Clive tonight (Dallas County) near Price Chopper near Waukee. First time I've seen this here that I can recall. Had it for about 15 minutes then it switched off it and hasn't returned.

 

Screenshot_2015-07-31-21-13-44.png

while there is some new stuff coming in wdm, that B41 has been live for about 9 months now you can see which tower it is by searching that GCI in our spreadsheet in the premier section

not that it probably means anything, but i activated a new LG G4 for one of my family members last night and it had LTE roaming enabled in the LTE settings under ##DATA#, not sure if it was enabled out of the box or it got enabled during activation/profile updates.

 

Latest speedtest from home

 

 

 

It doesn't seem to be my phone (G2) either considering it pulled 18mbps speeds in another location. I've never seen anything close to what you say you go on Merle Hay Rd.

 

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ok, yeah thats not the tower i was thinking you were connecting too. the one you just posted is right next to I-35 by lower beaver. and with a -110 signal and on B26 you aren't going to get great speeds very often. Since B26 travels further and penetrates better most people are on it which makes it overloaded. Plus your signal isn't helping things much. you can blame johnston for being the city of trees tree leaves are killer on signal the tower on the very north end of merle hay past where merle hay and 70th meet (its on the youth homes campus) is the one with B41, thats the one i get great speeds from on B41 and good speeds on the other bands, but again its still signal dependent.

i did just do a speed test on B25 from the tower you were connected to in your screenshot on my way to work this morning and pulled 15 meg down, but i had a -90 signal and a ~15 SNR. so the better signal allowed better speeds. thats the not so great thing about LTE and data speeds. There are more things working against it than for it so it makes it harder to get good speeds. you have to be on a band/sector thats not overloaded, have a good signal, and a good signal to noise ration (SNR) to even think about getting a good speedtest.

take where i work for example. in the parking lot i can run a speedtest on the tower i connect to here and get around 4 to 5 meg down with a -95 signal and around a 9 SNR. if i drive to the tower and get closer my signal goes up to around -84 and my SNR goes up to 22+ and i can get 25+ meg down.

from what i've seen and the testing i've done i get the impression that optimization just needs to get done around here, on both B25 and B26. i think that would help people's speeds a lot. sure there will still be areas and towers that are just plain overloaded, but there are plenty of areas that a tower is covering that isn't overloaded but you get slow speeds simply because of signal.

I'm having a lot of issues in the market with my HTC One M9. I'll have a solid LTE signal but no data connection. Sprint replaced my SIM card and I did a complete reset of my phone. I started having problems within 6 hours. If I force 3G I am fine. Same location on LTE I'll have nothing. But it's not constant. Sometimes an airplane mode toggle clears it up for awhile. Here is what I'm connected to:

 

Good data performance:

Screenshot_2015-07-30-12-37-15.png

 

No data:

Screenshot_2015-07-30-12-38-26.png

 

No data:

Screenshot_2015-07-30-12-40-06.png

looks like you are connected to the clive water tower. while i don't get that way a ton, every time i'm around there i have no issues while on LTE.

i haven't kept up on it much but i have seen many posts about the HTC One M9 having tons of LTE data/signal issues, because of that i would say your phone is your issue and until HTC releases a fix (assuming they can) you are going to continue to have issues. or you can try getting a different phone somehow. maybe the executive services support team can help you swap to a different phone?