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Paynefanbro

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Everything posted by Paynefanbro

  1. Paynefanbro
    Bad photo but I came across a new AT&T install in Williamsburg by McCarren Park. According to Google Maps it has been installed since last summer but I don't think it's live. Whenever it does go live it'll cover what's probably their weakest area in Brooklyn. — — — — — T-Mobile eNB 894899 in a Sprint conversion located at 40.85249928698625, -73.92019513165127. This site was part of the initial phase of WiMax to LTE conversions that was done by Clearwire just before Sprint acquired them. The site doesn't even appear on Cellmapper even though you can clearly see the antennas in Streetview. I don't think it ever broadcasted the keep PLMN either. — — — — — Also good to see T-Mobile still doing new builds in the city that aren't Sprint conversions. eNB 331694 and a bunch of small cells went live October 2022 in Broad Channel to fill in what was once a massive gap in coverage. — — — — — Finally found my local Dish site. Instead of taking over Sprint's spot on what was once my home site, they moved onto the same building as the nearest Verizon site to me which is a little further away. Verizon doesn't have the best coverage in my house so that's a bit worrying for Dish but they might be alright because of lowband.
  2. Paynefanbro
    Yup just the 5MHz of Band 12. Might be an issue for the people still stuck on LTE only devices but standalone 5G is quickly becoming the norm. At this point it seems like half the time I look at the FieldTest screen on the iPhone I’m on standalone n41 with 3xCA.
  3. Paynefanbro
    Caught a T-Mobile site mid-upgrade this morning.
  4. Paynefanbro
    UScellular Launches 5G Mid-Band Network https://newsroom.uscellular.com/uscellular-launches-5g-mid-band-network/
  5. Paynefanbro
    Got my fastest standalone 5G speed test on T-Mobile today. eNB 41050 in Park Slope
  6. Paynefanbro
    New Gig+ Sites: eNB 877322 and eNB 41323 are gig+ sites. While I only got 843 on 41323, it initially shot over 1Gbps before settling down. — — — — — DoD sighting in Brooklyn. This is AT&T eNB 110691 in Red Hook. — — — — — Filled out Bergen Beach, Old Mill Basin, and Canarsie a bit on Cellmapper. The AT&T layers have started coming through but the T-Mobile layers are a bit slower to show up.
  7. Paynefanbro
    Fully converted sites: Sprint eNB 74020 -> T-Mobile eNB 326552 Location: 40.715917084573746, -73.77254385489373 Sprint eNB 79281 -> T-Mobile eNB 344423 Location: 40.73372014872347, -74.00341617480531 — — — — — Broadcasting keep PLMN: Sprint eNB 253671 Located at 40.57772361187426, -73.84865075580691 Sprint eNB 5944 Located at: 40.64903333540103, -73.79131072060973 — — — — — eNB 41646 and eNB 41638 are both gig+ sites.
  8. Paynefanbro
    Looks like Project Genesis is available in my area now too which is a plus. I don’t feel like dropping $400 on a Motorola Edge though lol.
  9. Paynefanbro
    I mapped AT&T and T-Mobile's networks in most of Bergen Beach and Mill Basin recently on Cellmapper. It looks like some of it is finally starting to appear on the map in Bergen Beach. The two standout things to me are: T-Mobile's older oDAS nodes have really great coverage. For example when I first saw eNB 49289-3 I thought it was one of those weird situations where a single cell covers ~3 small cells but it's just a small cell with no obstructions so it can be connected to across the that little channel that separates Mill Basin from Bergen Beach with a decent signal. Same deal with 49288-5, it has a range of a couple blocks which is rare on newer T-Mobile nodes. AT&T has better signal strength than T-Mobile in much of Bergen Beach despite both carriers being collocated on the same rooftop. I know T-Mobile's azimuths are different and whatnot but it seems like AT&T has fewer qualms about increasing power or adjusting downtilt for maximum coverage. Does AT&T having 20MHz of lowband spectrum between Band 12/14 have something to do with that? I ask because with that much lowband on LTE you likely have fewer fears about the network experience at edge of cell compared to T-Mobile who only has 5x5 Band 12 and Band 71 which can become congested a lot quicker. — — — — — Here are screenshots of my mapping. More of the area should load in over the next couple of days as I mapped almost all of the Mill Basin peninsula area. — — — — — Edit: Funny, after posting this one layer of AT&T fully updated to reflect all of the mapping I did.
  10. Paynefanbro
    I believe 180MHz was spotted in parts of Connecticut sometime last year too. Edit: Reddit showing a few examples in Florida, California, and NY as well from earlier this year.
  11. Paynefanbro
    Converted and live: Sprint eNB 74321 -> T-Mobile eNB 347217 Location: 40.711555634592045, -73.90205282897874 Sprint eNB 253648 -> T-Mobile eNB 344966 Location: 40.739909422602764, -74.00570475706513 Sprint eNB Unknown -> T-Mobile eNB 310766 Location: 40.760188344416285, -73.96886037075352 Sprint eNB Unknown -> T-Mobile eNB 894887 40.80706983542683, -73.91457816360656 Sprint eNB 6829 -> T-Mobile eNB 347832 Location: 40.5971347474561, -73.95019458988855 — — — — — Converted but not live: Sprint eNB 5888 Location: 40.62612064693741, -73.93488926518539
  12. Paynefanbro
    This site is live now. It's eNB 343958. — — — — — Verizon is gone from the roof of the building at the intersection of Flatbush and Fulton. Noticed it a couple of weeks ago but forgot to post about it. That's probably why they put up that new site across the street from LIU. T-Mobile already decommed the Clearwire equipment from that site but refuses to upgrade it to n41. Only AT&T has upgraded that site to midband. Something's up. — — — — — T-Mobile eNB 51834 is a gig+ site. Got 1.3Gbps in standalone mode. T-Mobile eNB 880578 got a backhaul upgrade. Got just over a gig in standalone mode on that site.
  13. Paynefanbro
    I was just in Greenwich, CT doing some shopping and naturally also doing some recording of cell sites in the background on Cellmapper. Specifically I was along Greenwich Ave which is the most dense part of the city. Verizon: Literally didn't work most of the time. Even though their coverage shows the entire city blanketed in 5GUW you'll only be on their nationwide 5G network or LTE if you're anywhere south of Lewis St. Regular 5G (non C-band) didn't work at all. I don't mean it was slow, I mean it didn't pass any data at all. When I opened Instagram it told me "No connection". In a store I was in I even overheard someone asking another shopper if they had service in the store. I immediately knew they were on Verizon. Switching to LTE gave me data although it was slow. In most stores I'd get speeds in the low teens, outside it'd go up to 40Mbps. Above Lewis St. my phone finally connected to n77. On n77 I was seeing ~180Mbps. It seems like the issue isn't backhaul, it's just that Verizon doesn't have any remaining capacity on the LTE side. AT&T: AT&T was slow but didn't suffer from the same "No data connection" issue that Verizon did. Speeds were in the low teens most of the time and peaked around 50Mbps. My phone hopped between AT&T's nationwide 5G and LTE frequently much like Verizon. Also just like Verizon, north of Lewis St. I suddenly connected to 5G+ which gave me speeds just over 100Mbps. AT&T also at least one small cell along Greenwich Ave for additional capacity and coverage and it's doing wonders for their network in the area. I'd go as far as saying it's probably the only reason they're not in the same situation as Verizon. T-Mobile: Not to sound like an ad for the company but I was really blown away by T-Mobile's performance here. T-Mobile is collocated on the same towers as Verizon and AT&T in the region but they have an extra site in the steeple a church along Greenwich Ave that they've upgraded with n41. As a result, T-Mobile not only has the strongest signal indoors and outdoors, they also have the fastest speeds by a long shot. Nowhere along the commercial strip did I drop below 500Mbps. Indoors I was seeing over 300Mbps and outdoors I peaked at over 600Mbps. For the sake of testing I switched my phone to LTE and saw speeds of 180Mbps indoors.
  14. Paynefanbro
    Sprint eNB 9493/5784 -> T-Mobile eNB 216213 Located at: 40.61611028489374, -74.01141959254353 Sprint eNB 6786 is converted but not live Located at: 40.647096399275, -73.97984672978991
  15. Paynefanbro
    Nice, this just prompted me to check to see if it's live in my area and whaddya know, I'm seeing the Dish PLMN inside my house. I might need to get another dual SIM phone to map Dish and Verizon on next!
  16. Paynefanbro
    Converted and live: Sprint eNB 5895 -> T-Mobile eNB 894894 Location: 40.66466311967771, -73.93960182432919 Sprint eNB 6178/7096 -> T-Mobile eNB 435611 Location: 40.78707921692206, -73.92779049281599 This was the Sprint site on the water tower on Randalls Island. Would've been converted just in time for GovBall but that got moved to Flushing Meadows. Sprint eNB Unknown -> T-Mobile eNB 326555 Location: 40.723502188026536, -73.8389076735834 This is also a gig+ site: — — — — — Converted but not live: Sprint eNB Unknown located at 40.73044202152905, -73.85233764709504 Got a pic when it was rainy a couple of days ago so it's super blurry but the silhouette should give it away: — — — — — Gig+ sites: T-Mobile eNB 50319 in Fort Greene is a gig+ site. Pulled over 900Mbps while driving by. Probably could've gotten over 1Gbps had I stopped in front of it. T-Mobile eNB 41153 on top of Chelsea Piers is a gig+ site.
  17. Paynefanbro
    Just got back from Jamaica so here's another quick write-up. Jamaica has two carriers, Digicel and Flow. If those names sound familiar it's because both of those companies are pretty much the duopoly of the Caribbean. You can find them throughout the Anglo, French, and Dutch Caribbean operating either under those brands or under a brand that Flow's parent company Cable & Wireless or C&W's parent company Liberty Global operates. — — — — — T-Mobile's Caribbean roaming agreement is with Digicel which means that in every country that Digicel operates they're the roaming provider and access to Flow's network is completely blocked. While I've tried Digicel's network in other countries, what makes Jamaica special is that they're headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica's capital. Because of this I went into it expecting Digicel to have a much better performing network than other Caribbean countries given it's their home market and their first market. I spent my time on the north coast of the country, traveling between Montego Bay and Ocho Rios. The four primary LTE bands and bandwidths on Digicel are: Band 2: 20MHz Band 4: 20MHz Band 5: 10MHz Band 12: 10MHz There is also one HSPA band on Digicel: Band 5: 5MHz Speeds were fantastic on their LTE network, averaging 40-60Mbps with peaks of over 100Mbps. They're making great use of carrier aggregation which provided consistent high speeds throughout the areas I traveled, significantly higher than what I saw in other Digicel countries. It helps that Digicel operates a fiber network in Jamaica meaning that they're able to supply their own backhaul to their own towers, though microwave backhaul is equally as common. Here's some speed tests on 3G and LTE. Check out how upload CA kicked in on that last speed test giving me 72Mbps upload speeds on LTE. What stood out to me was that Digicel still hasn't overlayed their 3G network in its entirety. Even though Digicel has so much lowband deployed, I found that indoor penetration on their LTE network was lacking at a lot of resorts, regularly dropping down to a strong 3G signal while indoors. At times I wondered if Digicel was using small cells or a DAS at some of these resorts but I never spotted any. Luckily 3G performance was good enough, typically in the low teens which was usable for any task on my phone. Finally, here are some pics of cell sites I saw while there (including a bonus monopalm) — — — — — EDIT: I forgot to mention that while you can use your roaming data allotment in all of these countries, Digicel has made it super easy to get an eSIM for tourists. You just go to this site and select which country you're traveling to and they'll show you all plans available for that destination. Super cool. https://esim.digicelgroup.com/#/
  18. Paynefanbro
    Terminal 5 DAS at JFK is doing well. SA n41 is pretty much the norm there. Virtually no difference in download speeds between SA and NSA 5G however on the upload side I was seeing faster speeds on NSA. Slightly lower pings too on NSA. Here are some tests:
  19. Paynefanbro
    Bye bye Band 5. Looks like T-Mobile wants to trade their Band 5 license in Myrtle Beach for Band 71. Post trade they’ll have 30x30MHz on 600Mhz spectrum. That’s a lot of lowband!
  20. Paynefanbro
    Sprint eNB Unknown -> T-Mobile eNB 875923 Location: 40.667111078004595, -73.84858333943421 Sprint eNB Unknown -> T-Mobile eNB 894870 Location: 40.68362651903586, -73.8854428368001 Sprint eNB 5848 -> T-Mobile eNB 347837 Location: 40.65273285505563, -73.97331867356841 This site is also a gigabit site. — — — — — T-Mobile eNB 894636 got a backhaul upgrade and is now a gigabit site too. — — — — — Passed by T-Mobile eNB 43727 which is a super old flagpole site and saw that it's covered in scaffolding so it's either about to be upgraded or decommed and moved to the Sprint site just below. The site is Band 66 only and probably one of the oldest T-Mobile sites in the city so I'm glad something is finally being done about it. — — — — — Also mapped a bunch of small cells in Vinegar Hill that hadn't been mapped before. I was a bit surprised to see my phone reporting a strong signal throughout the neighborhood despite the only macro being the one next to the Manhattan Bridge. Now I know why. Given the cell numbering scheme it looks like I might've missed one, eNB 134692-6/16. — — — — — A couple of oddities I've noticed with AT&T: There are a couple of AT&T tri-band small cells in Staten Island that they don't have deployed anywhere else. Most AT&T small cells in Staten Island were installed by ZenFi but these were installed by Crown Castle some time in the early 2010's. What makes them stand out is that they're using the AT&T Outdoor DAS and Wide Area DAS cell numbering scheme instead of the typical one they user throughout the city. I've also seen a few small cells using a new numbering scheme that I think may be borrowed from another region but AT&T has used on a couple of sites here from some reason. For example, eNB 117069 in Crown Heights has cell numbers 67 and 81.
  21. Paynefanbro
    I was just back there last week. I noticed that Verizon installed a bunch of oDAS nodes along 2nd Ave in Industry City. I think that they're easily the best performing carrier in that area. Sprint also has a bunch back there that I'm hoping T-Mobile will one day convert. Yup, QCI9. But as I understand it most AT&T plans are only QCI 8 and even their most expensive non-business unlimited plan is QCI 7. Performance hasn't been abysmal in my experience and has more or less matched performance when I've tested AT&T in the past on their branded (non-unlimited) prepaid services. From what I've seen, my experience on Boost Mobile also lines up with the general experience in NYC according to coveragemap.com. Some sites perform really well here, but most of them are generally much slower than anything VZW or TMUS has to offer. In the case of the test you quoted, that's just a poor area for AT&T as I've come across small cells that are as much as 4x faster than that one. AT&T just needs better macro density in much of the city.
  22. Paynefanbro
    At the Yankees game yesterday I got to test out all 3 carriers. It seems like not every area in the stadium has had their DAS upgraded to include 5G. For example in the Legends Suite I only saw LTE on every carrier but it performed really well; > 300Mbps on T-Mobile and over > 200Mbps on Verizon and AT&T. At our seats it was another story. To nobody's surprise Verizon was the best performing. I was seeing 1.2Gbps on Verizon thanks to mmWave but I kept experiencing this weird issue where my Verizon line kept dropping to no service/SOS. I had to do an airplane mode cycle to get reconnected the network multiple times. T-Mobile speeds were a steady 30Mbps both down and up but I did manage to get one test at 240Mbps. It seems like T-Mobile struggled with deciding what to connect to. I'd watch my signal strength go up and down as it bounced between SA 5G, NSA 5G, and LTE. Sometimes the 5GUC icon would appear and then randomly disappear. In spite of this there wasn't a single test I did that was below 30Mbps. Good enough in my opinion. AT&T was the slowest of the bunch. I couldn't get over 5Mbps on AT&T at my seat despite AT&T upgrading their DAS to include all available LTE bands, even Band 14. It was a consistent 5Mbps though and pings were also pretty low. I never saw it drop to the kbps range in my testing. Maybe they just got oversaturated.
  23. Paynefanbro
    Beautiful day yesterday so I went to Six Flags again. Soon we're gonna have to call this the Six Flags thread lol. I finally got a pic of the site that serves the entire park. It was super sunny so the picture was pretty backlit but I managed to edit it a bit to bring out some the detail. Sprint used to be at the very top of the monopole but their entire rack is gone now. T-Mobile was just below them so they didn't bother moving up since they still now have highest position on the site with Sprint gone. T-Mobile has an Ericsson 6449 deployed for n41, an RFS antenna for Band 2/12/66/71 and n25/71, and on one sector they have a a Band 2/66 high capacity antenna that actually has it's own eNB. Verizon has a Samsung massive MIMO C-band antenna, CBRS, and their usual Band 2/5/13/66 antennas. They also have a MatSing Ball antenna on the sector that faces Great Adventure. AT&T has their standard setup on 2 out of 3 sectors and on the third sector that faces Great Adventure they have 3 gigantic high capacity antennas. They have n5 deployed but no n77. Dish is a recent addition to the site, lowest on the monopole, just under AT&T. No high capacity setup on this site, just their normal single antenna per sector setup. To be fair they likely won't have the same amount of traffic as the big three so this is more than enough capacity for now. — — — — — Just like last year T-Mobile was still the fastest carrier in my testing followed by Verizon and then AT&T. None of the carriers were slow, just different levels of fast. I was getting upwards of 400Mbps on T-Mobile, 150Mbps on Verizon, and AT&T was ~50Mbps park wide.
  24. Paynefanbro
    Verizon ‘not just chasing POPs’ in 5G mid-band race https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/verizon-not-just-chasing-pops-5g-mid-band-race Sounds to me like Verizon is trying its best to ignore its competitors' biggest advantage over itself. Ignoring their competition is exactly what got them into this position. They coasted on their reputation for so long that they never thought they'd see the day where AT&T has a larger and faster LTE network than them and T-Mobile would have a larger and faster 5G network than them. They've got to be feeling the pressure.
  25. Paynefanbro
    Passed by earlier this afternoon and it's not live yet. — — — — — Saw this AT&T site and laughed because check out that uptilt. I thought it might've been a broken mount at first but each sector had one antenna pointed upward like this. Check out the range on this thing!
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