Volaris

Target's headquarters might use Sprintlink.

I looked up the Target WiFi IP address that I did a SpeedTest on yesterday. TCPIPUtils shows Sprintlink as the DNS servers.

http://www.tcpiputils.com/browse/ip-address/63.175.184.254

Target now has guest WIFI?

In my rural area all Target stores have had free WiFi for a few years.

Wifi for some restaurants like McDonalds and hotels up here use AT&T.  AT&T exists several states away.  I am sure this is the same type of set up.

Stores with AT&T WiFi in my area are so slow.

Sprint also shows as the 'ISP' at my local Target's free WiFi. For all we know, it might just be a VPN connection since the IP address is out of state and pings are higher than usual. No WiMax in this town.

For what it is, though, it works great. I use it each time I visit the store and it has never failed me.

Sometimes if you look thru your city's planning/permit department you'll find indoor coverage maps for Sprint. Here's one for Merced, CA from this public file. Coverage in this 80,000+ population city is mainly provided by the two left towers.

https://snapr.pw/i/8cfa809265.png

Green = indoor, red = in-car, and blue = standing outside on a street.

I get the feeling that many Sprint LTE towers are just turned on at minimum power until they come around to "optimize" them. In my area it's not uncommon to go into Walmart, Target, Costco, Sears, JCP, or any grocery store, etc and lose LTE signal once I'm inside, despite these places having a Sprint LTE tower right across the road (less than a quarter mile away). 3G, on the other hand, is solid everywhere in town, even beyond areas that the coverage map says they have coverage. This has been my experience with a Galaxy and iPhone.

For now I'm holding tight until 800MHz LTE comes along.

My other concern is that when comparing Sensorly LTE coverage maps for Sprint and T-Mobile (and the other two) in major cities/metros, Sprint's isn't anywhere as dark purple (stronger LTE signal) as the other carriers. Kinda worrisome especially compared to T-Mobile considering they're using weak AWS LTE for almost all cities (very few cities have 700MHz so far) yet their signal appears a whole lot stronger/solid. But I'm hopefully 800MHz LTE will fix all these for Sprint.

This would fit the bill for most carriers, though, since it supports EDGE, DC-HSPA+, TD-SCDMA (China), TDD-LTE, and FDD-LTE. 

But it's cool to see its specs - now we know what's coming up in smartphones later this year. LTE Cat. 10 with ability to aggregate 3 carriers up to 60MHz downlink (450Mbps max). 29 LTE bands. LTE Broadcast.

I bet AT&T would love to see more three carrier CA devices out there, considering they're up to 6 LTE bands.

I've seen a couple of MetroPCS sites/nodes that look like that around Los Angeles.  They have all been mounted lower, on a utility pole crossarm.

That was my first guess, since it's in a MetroPCS market and they heavily used DAS/small cells for coverage. Perhaps confirm with a T-Mobile LTE friend/phone?

I Googled and it seems they used NextG Networks for these installations in the NY market, and often ran into problems with towns/people since they put up a ton of these antennas in towns.

700MHz - LTE 5x5 (37Mbps) in areas they've acquired spectrum and deployed.

In areas with both 700MHz and 1700MHz/AWS LTE deployed, they're starting to activate Carrier Aggregation which combines the download throughput. They've stated they will also deploy PCS LTE in cities as needed/available.

2.5GHz uses a 8T8R panel so there's planning and permits involved for that. Then once all that is done and approved, they have to wait for one of the contractors to actually get to it and go install it. Then they need faster backhaul (think about it, just one 2.5GHz carrier on one sector can do around... 70Mbps or more? x 3 sectors = over 200Mbps more capacity on that tower). If the backhaul isn't fast enough, it'd just be hurting speeds on 1900MHz/800MHz LTE. And some companies are slow at upgrading backhaul. As an example, I read on HoFo that T-Mobile has over 200 work orders to upgrade backhaul in Tucson but CenturyLink is taking their sweet time to complete them. It's not always as easy as calling Comcast and requesting a faster package.  

I'm glad about the expanded coverage (and the map for Michigan looks perfect.  Its not Verizon-level coverage by any means, but it's close enough that 98% of people here will have zero problems).

 

 

But Page 23 is concerning. Based on the Dallas example provided, it looks like they're planning to increase "coverage" using low-band, but do so by removing rural sites, and un-densifying the network.  (In the photo TMO provided, 35 / 35-W / 35-E from Hillsboro heading north. "Mid-band only" shows 7 cell sites. "LTE + Low band" shows only 4. Similar patterns are visible on all the freeways heading into the city).

 

 

I really hope that's just an artifact of band scoping (all 7 sites will remain, but not all necessarily run low-band) or just mid-network upgrade weirdness in the photo.

 

But if it's not -- if the removal of sites shown in their photo is an accurate reflection of their strategy -- that's a huge mistake.

Highly doubt they'll be removed. There's tens of millions of T-Mobile phones out there that don't support 700MHz / band 12 LTE. 

In rural / low population areas, it may not make sense to upgrade every single tower. In rural California, I've seen some T-Mobile towers on rural highways about 1 mile apart... would be overkill to have 700MHz on both and likely cause too much interference. 

They still don't fully launch - considering even Tracfone and Straight Talk have Verizon LTE, I'd be surprised if these guys (also owned by Tracfone) don't get LTE. 

But once they get LTE and are at every Walmart, I can see them being very competitive against other budget brands. And others will respond, and we will all benefit.

I went to Costco in Visalia today and got the following speed on regular 5x5 1900MHz LTE (which maxes out at ~35Mbps). Just goes to show what an amazing job Spark does in offloading traffic off 1900MHz LTE and keeping everyone's speeds (even those of us without Spark) fast. In comparison, Hanford (all towers with 1900MHz LTE / no Spark) I've never seen double digit speeds - much less on a busy weekday afternoon. Very impressed!

Yes i get band 26 is in fresno in many locations, and same thing for band 41(spark if im not mistaken). The band 41 is only around the shaw and blackstone area and is only for roughly 5-7 blocks north and about the same to the west. My amazon prime videos usually only stream on band 26 at work , if its regular LTE than it is just buffering.

Thanks for the update! That must be why my iPhone 5C gets pretty solid LTE coverage around Fresno recently.

I'm hoping the same for Hanford since LTE is spotty with all towers having 1900MHz LTE, and we could use more capacity during peak times (speeds can get under 1Mbps). Which I guess is good news for Sprint - must be gaining customers here!

The southern most portion of the LCV market is blocked doe to proximity to san bernardino county exclusion zone but the rest should have it up by now. They started firing it up here in the UCV in october and almost all sites have it live by now. 

Here's hoping that Kings County is far enough from San Bernardino County to get some 800MHz LTE love.

Yeah there's definitely something wrong with the new Spark maps. A few days ago it showed Selma and Kingsburg as having Spark (small coverage areas) and it seems like that coverage area blew up 10x as big now to reach Fresno/Clovis. Others are also saying something is up.

http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/6826-coverage-map-updated-lots-more-spark-and-lte/

I have two questions. Has anyone detected any band 26 / 800MHz LTE anywhere in the Lower Central Valley? Also, is 1900MHz LTE / band 25 already optimized or will it get optimized once 800MHz comes around?

Tmobile lte: brought to you by att. Lol

Yup. Although so is Sprint LTE, except Sprint pays AT&T for that priviledge.

http://www.lightreading.com/mobile/backhaul/sprint-to-place-big-backhaul-bet/d/d-id/690289

In an ironic twist, it appears that AT&T, one of Sprint's key wireless competitors, will get a big piece of a first round of buildouts, said to involve about a dozen of Sprint's largest, most concentrated markets, including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., and New York City. "AT&T cleaned house," says a source, noting that AT&T already had an advantage because it had fiber near a lot of the tower locations initially targeted by Sprint. Plus, "AT&T dropped its pants on pricing."

I think that what made it very difficult for Sprint to project manage the whole thing is that NV was vendor financed. Their money, their schedule. Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile would only release money when a milestone was met. That's a powerful incentive. When it's vendor financed, other consideration come into play besides meeting milestones like maximizing crew utilization, just in time delivery of backhaul and equipment, etc.

Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding.

Good post. Completely agree. If they needed money for that financial quarter, they were going to prioritize AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile to get that cash out of their hands.

After all, as long as everything in the Sprint contract was met, they were getting paid. No need to give Sprint priority.

Hungry smaller vendors are well motivated. Old bureaucratic ones not so much.

Yup. Also, Ericsson and Alcatel Lucent were probably very motivated to keep their two biggest US customers (AT&T and Verizon) very pleased to assure they won secondary LTE contracts (ie. 1700MHz/AWS for Verizon and 850/1900MHz for AT&T) in the future. The power of big money.

When Verizon rapidly covered my area with LTE (AT&T ILEC) they heavily used microwave. Verizon towers that previously didn't have microwave dishes suddenly had one. One Verizon-only tower near me has 3 of them pointing at different towers.

Apparently Level 3 helped them out with that.

http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/level-3-wins-hybrid-fibermicrowave-wireless-backhaul-deal-verizon-wireless/2011-04-21

On the other hand, T-Mobile already had fiber backhaul on most urban market towers (to power their 42Mbps HSPA+ 3G/4G), so that really helped them quickly deploy LTE in cities. It was just a matter of paying $4 billion (AT&T breakup money) to Ericsson and Nokia to upgrade those 37,000 towers.

This is awesome. It's the right move. Wholesale customers are a huge portion of Sprint customer additions, and with T-Mobile/Verizon/AT&T not putting any restrictions on new model phones on their MVNOs, it'll help Sprint MVNOs better compete against their competition.

 

At the risk of sounding like the boy who cried wolf, I think Sprint has finally lit up the tower at Akers and 198 in Visalia with LTE. I thought they were working on them last January, but as Oedipus pointed out, Sprint's towers were second from the bottom. 

 

I've seen a sky trak there the last couple weeks, and I can confirm that there are new panels on that rack, and today I am on 4G. I took some Sensorly tracks and speed tests. It's certainly not Spark but still better than 3G. 

 

Woohoo! As someone that goes between Visalia and Hanford quite a bit, this is a welcome addition. Slightly better indoor data at the Orchard Walk stores would also be awesome.

For anyone wondering why the main downtown/Costco flag pole tower in Merced hasn't been touched, it seems Sprint has been working with the city to change the design (to a T bar monopole) to avoid a GMO. 

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Special thanks to mj1108 at HoFo for finding these cool documents (he was checking to see why T-Mobile hadn't upgraded this tower from 4G to LTE). He's also seen T-Mobile install and test 700MHz LTE in Merced, so hopefully Sprint is soon next with 800MHz LTE.

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First attempt in Jan 2014 was to keep it as a flag pole but with a fat top cover. I believe AT&T uses this design in Fresno?

https://www.cityofmerced.org/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?BlobID=13382

Second attempt in Oct 2014 was to change it to a regular T bar monopole.

https://www.cityofmerced.org/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?BlobID=14142

It seems like they approved the last option with conditions (odd, I think it looks worse than the first option). Hopefully that means it'll be upgraded to LTE soon... that tower could really use it. Also, you can see the "real" indoor / car / street coverage map of Merced in those documents, for anyone interested. 

At this level it shows all signal levels for LTE. And that's not helpful. Zoom in to the point it shows the BEST and FAIR signal gradients for LTE. Then ignore FAIR and just see where BEST is shown. And that's pretty accurate.

Sweet. I can confirm the BEST signal fits Hanford more accurately (just 1 tower out of 3 lit here). 

Seems like Sprint updated their coverage maps to show all towers that currently have LTE. 

The coverage range of LTE towers is exaggerated compared to the tower's range on the "voice" maps, but at least you can somewhat tell what towers have LTE right now.   Hopefully they keep updating the maps frequently.

Got 1X for a big chunk of highway 198 between Visalia and Hanford, even with good signal strength. Does this mean the tower across Visalia Airport / Goshen is being upgraded? Phone switched to weaker 3G signal once I got closer to Hanford (it's a 4S / no LTE).