compuwizz

I'm now officially a Las Vegas resident. I'm glad that there are some LTE towers being slowly turned on. I moved from the Washington, DC area which had some LTE hot spots around where I lived. Hopefully Sprint is able to blanket the area a bit quicker than they have back east.

When I do get LTE signal, what information can I donate from my iPhone 5?

Don't the Canadian carriers already use this existing AT&T model iPhone on their AWS LTE networks?

Can it really? NYC is my market so Alcatel Lucent.

I was wondering if it was but looks like it doesn't matter since we're both on the same type of equipment with the same phone models.

My iPhone seems to lock onto LTE very well even if the signal is weak (100-114 decibels. Signal still amazingly works sometimes but it's like slow 3G). However my phone tends to do this a lot and eats my battery.

 

Who is providing the equipment in your area? Samsung/Ericson/ALU? It could be related to that.

I'm in an ALU market.

I also find that its hard for my iPhone 5 to keep ahold of a Sprint LTE signal. I don't know if Sprint isn't using full power or what yet, but it'll fade very fast where the 3G signal stays strong. When I'm signal hunting and looking at sensorly maps, I see I should be getting at least 3 bars, but usually its around 1. I tend to have to be really close to the tower to get 4 or 5 bars. It'll also jump ship back to 3G in a heartbeat. Then toggling to airplane mode and back and its back on LTE.

Friends with iPhones on other Verizon and AT&T seem to lock on and stay locked to LTE even in low signal areas.

They are running 3-4 months behind in most markets. Finding skilled labor is the latest challenge. There are only so many people out there with the skills to do the work, and all 4 major carriers and most regional carriers all doing upgrades at once, straining the labor market.

I'm too much of a wimp to climb a tower, but I can configure routers and swap out chassis cards. Where do I put in my application to help with NV? :-P

I'm in the Virginia area mostly. However as luck would have it, Trucks are at the tower located near my house right now.

It doesn't seem there has been much expansion on the LTE 4G project in the DC area since Sprint did their soft launch of the market. I almost want to travel to Chicago to get a taste of what it'll feel like having LTE everywhere and not having to do the airplane mode cycle to help keep me motivated to stay with Sprint.

I parked at the Dulles airport yesterday just so that I could play with my phone on LTE and enjoy the speeds.

Things are definitely on schedule for the first LTE spots to start showing up by Late April/ Early May, so depending on where you are going for vacation. So far no permits have been pulled by Sprint for work on their DAS's in the Strip casinos.

I find it odd that they would have to do permits to do indoor work. Did T-Mobile have to do that? I see T-Mobile 1900 MHz HSDPA everywhere inside the major casinos.

However LTE on AT&T / Verizon on the casino floors is pretty scarce. If Sprint does put LTE on the DAS systems, it'll be fun to have bragging rights amongst my friends about having it.

 

Not sure yet but definitely in the strip somewhere. Need to find a place to stay for about a week. Recommendation?

Since Ceasars properties are starting the resort fee BS that MGM properties have, its a toss up. I usually stay slightly off the strip at the Rio. Its decently priced. On strip either NY NY or Planet Hollywood. For really cheap nights on strip, the Quad (formerly Imperial Palace).

So I haven't had a chance to take a picture of the towers on the map, however I have noticed a difference in speeds during the week versus the weekend. Both on and off the strip it has been faster and more consistent. At the Target on Blue Diamond Rd, I got 2 megabit down and 1 up today.

I saw a bucket truck working on a tower off Flamingo near the Sketchers Outlet/UNLV area. I need to look up to see if it could have been Sprint work or T-Mobile. I saw Ericson SUVs around town tonight also.

What I've noticed different about towers in the Vegas area versus where I'm from in the DC market, the Vegas towers are a lot shorter and most of them are monopoles instead of triangular tall latice structures. What are the reasons for using shorter towers?

Unfortunately 3G seems to be really crazy the past week. Around the Rental Car Center, I can get 2+ megabit on 3G. However on the lower side of the strip, I can barely get any data service even though I have full signal. Calls and texts work fine, just no data. My phone will cycle between 1X and EVDO.

Other parts of the strip its hit or miss on the road, but inside the casinos it seems to be ok (MGM, NY NY, Palms, Rio, South Point).

This is different than a standard cable modem service though. It is an SLA based product that is symmetrical bandwidth up/down.

A couple months ago I remember someone stating they talked to an installer at a tower who stated the tower was being fed via Coax from a cable company.

Here is a quick QA from Comcast on the technology:

http://comcastdownload.com/February112013/from-the-partner-sales-engineer-ethernet-over-hybrid-fiber-coax-ethernet-over-hfc.html

I too had full LTE service at the Convention Center for the auto show. It was awesome. Downstairs not much signal, but upstairs and outside full signal.

Also, I saw crews laying fiber for WA33XC928 today in Reston.

Good point, I guess since they own their own MPLS enabled network on the wireline side, the per port cost wouldn't be all that much internally for Sprint.

I'm used to seeing quotes for MPLS as a potential customer so the Metro Ethernet exchanges would be more cost effective for me instead of a MPLS network.

I see people mentioning Alternative Access Vendors (AAV) as a backhual type. How is this different than fiber to the tower or Microwave?

I would assume this would be companies such as Zayo, Sidera, XO, TW Telecom, Cox, Fibertower etc providing fiber to the tower versus the local ILEC/RLEC in the area. Is this assumption correct?

Related to fiber backhual, I have heard of some new Metro Ethernet peering exchanges that allow various companies such as the above to all interconnect to bridge the same customer onto the same network. So say Sprint could get a 10 Gigabit link to an exchange in a common place and then get linked up to all its towers that are served by the various Fiber (metro ethernet non Sonet) providers via one or two connections versus having a physical connection to each tower's fiber running back to a Sprint switch location.

All the fiber providers would connect into the same Sprint VLAN on the exchange and then Sprint could *see* all its towers.

These same exchanges can also be dropoff points for Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile towers too.

Its much cheaper than dealing with MPLS ports and trying to get all the towers onto some giant MPLS network.

I cannot prove you wrong. However, based on a conversation I had with a Samsung engineer early in deployment where he was talking about cable Ethernet installed at a site in Chicago, he said that sometimes they are installing coax directly to the telco box. He said final connections from AAV were not fiber very often. He is the guy I got the term "indirect fiber" connections from.

 

The connection from the telco box (demarcation) to the routers would be Cat 5e in this instance.

 

Robert via Samsung Note II via Tapatalk

DOCSIS based Ethernet over Coax possibly could be what this site was using.

UPDATE: Looks like its sometimes called Ethernet over DOCSIS: http://www.cable360.net/ct/strategy/businesscases/31019.html#.UOcVV2_Af_s

Is there a separate 800 MHz SID for DC or does the Baltimore one cover it?

I don't know if it helps, but the DC area SID for 1900 is 4195.

The CDMA iPhone 5 does support 1X at 800 MHz http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html

The reason that HD Voice isn't running on any US carriers is because they have to upgrade switching equipment to support the new voice codecs. The dual mics in the EVO just help with noise cancellation, but its not an HD call.

It *could* be possible to make an HD call between two different carriers if the carriers interconnected via IP based tandem instead of the PSTN. Right now every carrier in Canada supports HD Voice but only on their own network.

These HD islands are annoying however there are providers seeking to help interconnect each carrier and transcode possible different codecs.

For example, Inteliquent is allowing interconnects with HD codec options such as G.722 and AMR-WB. They would then transcode the call to the desired HD codec on the second leg of the call (for example a Sprint to VZW call).

The companies working on HD tandem interconnects already were alternative tandems to the major ones from Verizon/AT&T. Inteliquent (formerly Neutral Tandem), Intelepeer and Peerless Networks are allowing HD interconnects now.

Internationally, there are some carriers doing HD interconnects between themselves without a middle-man.

Not saying that Sprint is using this company, but check out Zayo's metro fiber foot print. http://www.zayo.com/interactive-network-map

The site even shows where some Wireless MSCs are that are hooked up to Zayo.

So with 800 1x being deployed and used, what happens if I'm in an area with 1900 MHz LTE and no 800 MHz LTE? Will my iPhone, which has only one radio, have to decide whether it wants great coverage or the fastest connection?

Or even if my phone has to choose between 800 1x and 1900 EVDO?

So like most people on this forum, one of my Chrome tabs is this forum, the other is Sensorly. It looks like there has been some new mapping near the original Reston Sprint building blip at Sunrise Valley and Fairfax County Parkway. I was there last night and couldn't get a signal so this is definitely a new addition. I haven't been by today to see if its actually active or not.