Joski1624

I hate to say it, but the coverage is inaccurate. "LTE Plus" coverage got torched, and regular LTE is mostly exaggerated, but is very understated in my area. There's actually many areas showing up now as roaming in my neck of the woods. Even the voice coverage maps that were accurate are not anymore. :'(

I found lots of 10x10 B25 in Cuyahoga County today. I also found it for the first time in Geauga and Medina Counties. This means much faster speeds on B25. It's great news for those of us without B41.

 

Try *#0011#

 

This works on my GS6. It shows the bandwidth there.

My guess is that the bandwidth display is a Samsung engineering screen thing, because I saw it too when I briefly had one. My LG and Kyocera devices have identical engineering screens which look different from Samsung. The dialer code did nothing for me.

 

I drove as far west as I-77 and 480 and didn't see the proper EARFCN pop up, but I did find a site in Solon with 26615/8615 which is only 5 MHz away from the G block primary carrier

I may have unintentionally uncovered 10x10 LTE carriers on B25 on the west side and downtown yesterday. I found it via my logs. I have a rooted device, so SCP also logs EARFCNs. 8640 download EARFCN showed up at sites in Rocky River, Lakewood and one downtown. Does anyone out there have an engineering screen that shows the bandwidth? I'd like to verify that this is indeed the 10x10 carrier that's all the rage in Columbus. Speed tests could do it too provided upload is around 20 Mbps or greater.

I believe Columbus is doing 10X10+5x5 and load balancing between the two carriers currently.  I would imagine that the same might happen for NW Ohio until the equipment approvals for more than 10x10 happen.

Toledo and Sandusky have had a 10x10 B25 LTE carrier for at least the past year, so I'm curious why they would want more. I tried looking at the PDF doc, but it won't download for some reason.

I will mention too that I think we're going to have a B26 launch soon. On one of my devices, I've had B26 only scans running for the last few months. I've had numerous times where I've ended up on B25 since labor day weekend. Nothing has shown in my logs yet, but I suspect that a B26 test mode is active which I think would probably kick off any regular user.

Actually, B41 3rd carrier has been around at least since July in our market.  The first ones were spotted on 7/3/2016 in Warren, Canfield and North Lima.

 

Clearwire B41 conversions started in August (a government mandated replacement).  11 have been found so far, but the actual amount is likely much higher.  All of them were found on the west side, so it looks like Sprint is going from west to east.  None have been found yet east of I-77.  Unfortunately, these aren't being converted to full build.  Sprint instead is converting  the sites to what are called mini-macros.  The radios on the towers are being swapped out, but the existing antennas remain.  The Huawei base station equipment is also removed during the conversion.  Each radio acts like a single sector B41 site, so they all have unique GCIs.  This has made it more of a pain to track, but it isn't overly complicated.  The plus side is that these converted sites, in most cases, have B41 2nd carrier and Carrier Aggregation whereas the Huawei equipment was a single B41 carrier.

 

  Most of what is left of our 3G only sites are GMOs.  GMO conversions have happened, but at a painfully slow pace.  Most of the full build iDEN conversions now have LTE.  The last known new full build site to go live, which is in Ashtabula County, had LTE active when it went live.

    I actually still use my N5 for video streaming since the Nexus 5X doesn't seem to have HDMI support     I ran into the issue where the microphone ceased to function.  I replaced the module which included the USB, but it didn't work.  I later found out that it was a common problem caused by the vibrator in the phone literally wearing the phone out.  There were some suggested workarounds by way of using paper shims, but I didn't want to bother.  The phone was about 2 years old at the time I started having problems. 

 

    If it were me, I'd probably stick with the N5X.  The only thing I wasn't happy about is that the CA engineering screen is busted, but it definitely works for 2CA - not that I ever have any need for such speeds.  The nearest known B41 site to me is about 10 miles away.   In my experience, B41 RF performance is marginally better than the N5.  I briefly had a Galaxy S6 (I think that was the model), and the B41 performance was very good.  The only reason I returned it was because it was too big and I was constantly bumping the screen with my palms.  Band 25 works about as well as with the N5 (which always worked pretty well on B25).  I haven't been on B26 enough to really give a report on the performance.  The nearest known live B26 site is about 50 miles to my south.

It sounds to me like Sprint may be taking the same approach with non build out areas with PCS as they did with their WiMAX network on 2.5/2.6 . None of the WiMAX protection sites in my region were on Sprint's coverage map either, but they certainly were live and most of them had something on plotted Sensorly.

I'm on the new unlimited plan with two other friends. We had an older unlimited plan that was much more expensive than what the new plan offered. The only minor drawback was that the roaming data allotment (which for some reason never works) dropped, but the hotspot capability has been nice, so no regrets so far. None of us use enough data in a given month to trigger the "deprioritization" threshold.

Individual markets may be or soon may be tracking small cells. I help manage the threads for Cleveland, and nothing to my knowledge has been found here yet. The closest thing that has been found here are a handful of outdoor DAS sites on utility poles scattered throughout Cleveland and Akron, OH. They've all been found in residential areas, though my understanding is that small cells will target congested areas.

I will add that I think Sprint would be wise to fire up a B41 3rd carrier considering the load will be extremely high. There's really no reason as to why it needs further delay with WiMAX gone, but unfortunately, I don't see it happening . I'm kind of expecting another black eye for Sprint .

If anyone is going to be at the parade downtown today, let us know how the network holds up with all those people down there. Some speed test screenshots would be nice.

 

I hear close to a million people will be down there.

Most sites that cover downtown have B41 at this point; the Clear sites aren't carrying 100% of the weight anymore. I had usable B41 at the Cavs game a couple months ago, and the arena was pretty full. Perhaps we'll find out how things go as I believe there will be more people there today than at the RNC.

There are threads that show how to identify Sprint equipment on towers, so I invite you to check it out sometime. Sometimes the Sprint coverage map can help, but it isn't so helpful in urban areas where site density is better. Another idea if you're able to do so is pitch in a few bucks towards supporting s4GRU . There are maps of Sprint sites and locations in the sponsorship areas.

tower conversions are good news as sprint greatly needs better coverage everywhere outside cities, with 3G sprints coverage is pretty darn good but because LTE is more fragile you end up with lots of lte spots with 3g in between rather than uniform lte coverage.

 

if they spent more money on adding new full tower build outs and fixing the coverage id bet that people would flock to sprint.

Actually, it wouldn't take very many new sites to fill in remaining coverage gaps with native Sprint service in your market (CDMA services). Your iDEN conversions mostly filled in a lot of substantial coverage holes that were west of Bowling Green to the Defiance area. The same is true for us in Cleveland with Ashtabula County going from freeway only coverage to almost continuous coverage just by doing iDEN conversions.

i would rather have a better B25 and 41 signal everywhere than 1x800

 

It could be looked at this way: 1x800 is a pecursor to Band 26 which will help everyone. Hopefully the Canadian side rebranding will progress fairly quickly in order to make it happen. I'm not sure about areas outside of Toledo to the south and west, but metro Toledo and points East are full of B25 10x10. I think that is more beneficial for rural areas than B41.

 

I've been analyzing your market too and found that Sprint has added at minimum about a dozen sites (likely more that aren't iDEN conversions). Cleveland has gained about the same in iDEN conversions, but the big difference is that the Toledo market is about half the size of what is here, so the percentage of new native service by the addition of new sites is greater for you fine folks

X800 has been cutting out 4 days. Does anybody else until you don't notice these things or no? This is the Toledo Market I apologize for not stating that

Sent from my LGLS992 using Tapatalk

1x800 still needs a lot of work in newly launched areas in the Cleveland Market, so my bet is that this also applies for Toledo. 1x1900 still outperforms (sometimes substantially) 1x800 in the primary IBEZ where it has only been on for a few months, and only officially launched about a month ago.

(snip)

In other markets where they did have unique sites, I think some of them have been converted already. I believe the Cleveland market has had a few Nextel conversions.

Sent from my Nexus 6P

Yeppers, so far in Cleveland and the Toledo, OH markets, most iDEN conversions (about a dozen in each market) were primarily done to expand Sprint's native footprint. The only exceptions that I've found so far is a couple iDEN conversions in Akron, OH. In those cases, it was clear to me that the purpose was a fill in site to improve Sprint's urban network experience. There really isn't anymore Nextel sites here that would substantially expand the network footprint, so going forward, I think it'll be done for densification.

Again, it could just be a matter of each device displaying identical battery usage in a different fashion. Or the GPS routines on the Note 5 are somehow far less efficient than on the Nexus 5. Your comparison of the same behavior producing different results with different devices is a reasonably strong argument that it's a device issue (if there even is a true "issue"), not an app issue..

 

-Mike

Yup, I've also got a device that likes to blame SignalCheck for battery drain even if I leave it off for a majority of the battery discharge duration. I don't perceive any noticeable difference in battery drain regardless if SCP is running or not. The real culprit is the screen, but the phone will only blame the screen if I leave SCP off the entire time.

You are correct

Yep, 1x800 has been firing up like crazy in the Cleveland Market too.  It first was found via SCP logs in testing mode on February 18th in Downtown Cleveland.  It only formally went live in my area (I live 30 miles east of the city) on April 11th.

Ok I feel very stupid now . Another question though: is there a way to use the GCI to obtain the cascade ID of a site?

Eh, kinda. Cascade ID order for the most part correlates with a GCI pattern at least in Samsung markets, but there are gaps in site IDs. So there's no way to precisely tell. Fortunately S4GRU has site IDs for a majority of sites except for some that have more recently come online. The best bet to start figuring out which site is which is to develop a spreadsheet containing your market's known site IDs, and log in the related field data. It's the toughest to match when data is lacking, but becomes progressively easier as a more defined pattern emerges.

I asked a few weeks ago about protection sites, but never got a response, so that's why I was very specific in my wording. Some protection sites are still very far from deployed B41 areas. Nice to get some feedback on the issue I sympathize with you regarding B26 as I am in the same boat being inside the Canadian IBEZ .

Today's the day WiMAX is scheduled to die nationwide at least for all non-protection sites