red_dog007

137 New 5G markets, 160+ Million covered.

https://about.att.com/newsroom/2020/5g_announcements.html

Coverage map still not updated.

TMobile has the capex, we will see if they can execute.  Sure they have spectrum now, but before Sprint they had LTE spectrum on par with VZW.  Half the customers and their data speeds were only on par.

With VZW deploying CBRS, I expect them to take away a lot in Auction 105 of which this spectrum has been deployable since January. So Im not sure how much of a head start TMobile has even on the 2.5GHz deployment front. VZW is supposed to launch 5G in Q3 so we will see how much work they have been doing behind the scenes if any at all.  Hopefully it will be straight to SA, non of this NSA nonsense.  For me personally 5G has been about the SA. I want to be able to turn off LTE and really see 5G-only coverage/speed.

Yeah, it would be kinda nice if the FCC just went a head and repacked it so you can easily make 5 5MHz blocks in SMR.  Redo the band plan, revoke 5MHz and auction that off.  Then use those precedes to pay the former A and B license holders. Allow for smaller license holders with deployed spectrum to have discounted rates. Have exceptions for smaller outfits to seek additional funding if they need to completely replace equipment and/or utilize a different band, or even have priority access.

It seems like it would be something the FCC would be interested in as they seek additional spectrum.

8 hours ago, Tengen31 said:

Most likely. I did find a tower in my area using 60 MHz of it.

 

Sent from my SM-G975U1 using Tapatalk

 

 

That signal is a lot worse than B66. How far are you from the tower and what kind of obstructions you have?

From my understanding, the B48 equipment is power limited to 50W. So you have to setup your configuration within that power envelop.  So it is either more carriers for faster speeds nearer the tower or less carriers so you can maximize coverage. I figured 40MHz would be kinda default to best optimize coverage with speeds. Guess not.

15 hours ago, RedSpark said:

Holy cow. T-Mobile is a force to be reckoned with.

Hopefully.  VZW still seems to be betting them in overall data performance.  Seems like with the Sprint merger they are now on an even playing field :P.

I expect VZW to walk away with 40MHz in all the top pops in Auction 105, I wonder if TMobile has any plans to buy or use unlicensed.  Seems like it would be better to use that than 5GHz.

2 hours ago, RedSpark said:

Difference is that T-Mobile under-promises and over-delivers.

I don't know about.  From what I have seen

2G->LTE was cheap. Strictly just enough to enable LTE

New LTE coverage being just a single band, in a lot of cases just PCS or AWS

700 being just sprinkled around. Its a lot better now, but taken a long time to get to where it is now, but in many cases still very much so lacking due to lack of deployment. Especially new coverage that lacks it.

600 very much a sprinkle but the map makes you think they are done with it in a given area with it.

Reguardless of how fast it takes, still gotta sit through another full buildout of 2.5GHz. 😕 65k towers, gotta average 1800 sites a month for 3yrs to get a full 2.5GHz buildout on TMobile sites.  However, with how the currently build out, I wouldn't expect them to do a full build out of it. I can see a lot of low band sites not getting midband at all still and midband only sites getting added just 600MHz. 

Then at levels smaller than macro, will TMobile be able to just import those sites into their core or do they gotta do another build out there? Aug 2019 Sprint reported 32k small cells which is actually way more than TMobile's listed 25k small cells.

17 hours ago, RedSpark said:

T-Mobile lays out $60B, five-year buildout plan for 5G

Great background. The sheer amount of Capex here is impressive. I got so used to seeing drips and dribbles from Sprint over the years. It was really sad.

Some more background here: There's no slowdown in sight for T-Mobile's industry-leading 5G expansion efforts

At least it isn't a cut.  That's roughly $12B a year.  Sprint and TMobile combined where already at this level.  Just getting shuffled around now to new priorities.  It's kinda unfortunate cause Sprint almost finished their Tri-Band build out and now we have to sit through it yet again with TMobile.

For markets that TMobile is already using n41, are they refarming spectrum from Sprint's side, spectrum sharing or just using unused spectrum?

1 hour ago, mdob07 said:

I wonder if AT&T plans to deploy it at some point. On my AT&T S20 Ultra B48 isn't enabled right now, though the phone does support it. It is enabled on my T-Mobile S20+. Its funny what they pick and choose to enable in their firmware, the only NR bands enabled right now are N5 and N260. I guess they'll enable more in future updates as they flip more spectrum to NR. 

Might save a tee tiny bit of battery life as the phone isn't scanning through unused frequencies.

On 5/10/2020 at 5:38 AM, mdob07 said:

Several people have seen B48 active on Verizon already. Its just the licensed bit that gets auctioned off in July. The rest is like B46 LAA if I understand that correctly. Theres 3 priority levels, Government, license holder, then everyone else IIRC.

https://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php/1916611-Verizon-4G-LTE-Speed-Test-Results-Round-2/page6

(posts 81 & 89)

From what I understand, in January FCC allowed cellular commercialization while maintaining rules outlined in the tiered strategy.  So that puts all carriers into the General Authorized Access tier if they utilize CBRS now.  Through the auction scheduled in July, they have the opportunity to upgrade to the Priority Access tier thus securing dedicated interference free spectrum.

20 hours ago, mdob07 said:

The Nashville tornado back in March wrecked havoc on Verizon and others networks. We had a bunch of stores in various parts of KY lose their WAN circuits for almost 2 weeks. One of our stores in Nashville took a direct hit from it. I've seen some additional cameras from the one in the linked story and it was pretty gnarly inside the store. I was saying the same thing though, I thought they could have rerouted traffic differently to get those circuits that were 200+ miles away from the damage back up sooner. Nashville must be one of their main network hubs.

https://www.wkrn.com/news/nashville-tornado/surveillance-video-shows-impact-of-tornado-at-hermitage-kroger/

Yep, that's the one that talking about 200 120 miles away.  Chattanooga was hit a couple weeks ago and took down Verizon in the greater area.

You'd think we'd be routeable through ATL.  I wish I had a line on Sprint back in March as well.  I think they have a major hub in Nashville. I at least didn't hear about Sprint being down.

I've had a line on AT&T since December.  I must say, either they have been lucky or their network is pretty robust.  I have been extremely impressed with them.  Coverage is consistent. Always have a pretty solid signal. But there have been some incidents lately were VZW has just been down for days due to weather. TMobile has even been impacted but not to the same extent.

So far this year VZW has been down for almost 10 days.  A tornado 200 miles away impacted my entire areas service. Metro area is like 350k people.  You'd think that they could reroute traffic that went over the fiber they lost in that storm. Then a recent tornado here took them down again. TMobile went down this time as well but they went to zero service for a few days. The local ISP lost 125miles of fiber, and a major line with 825 fibers had to be reran and spliced in.  So the damage done to others was pretty intense.  But no relief trucks from TMobile or VZW.  I didn't see one either from AT&T but their service was up and usable regardless.

4 hours ago, belusnecropolis said:

Which router? I am about to build the RM500Q-GL into a custom router.

The T-Mobile home internet box has an SoC cat. 16 radio, it is basically a Nighthawk with an extra RJ45 plus an RJ11 port, minus USB C.

Oh, it didn't click with me that those are two different things.  I saw that and assumed "oh wow, that tmobile router is made by Quectel!". 

What are you gonna put that RM500 into out of curiosity?  I have been thinking about doing an LTE router or just dropping a modem into my pfsense box for backup purposes.

12 minutes ago, bmoses said:

 

thats how t-mobiles implementation of 5G works. ALL towers have the EN-DC stuff enabled to be anchors for 5G, even if they aren't broadcasting 5G themselves. So you can be connected to LTE from an anchor tower and 5G from a different tower. Thats why you see so many complaints about the 5G speeds, your phone says 5G since you are connected to a LTE anchor thats close, but the 5G could be coming from miles away. EDIT: plus you don't have to be connected to 5G for the 5G icon to show, just being connected to LTE with EN-DC enabled will show the 5G icon.

It makes since.  Kinda funny too cause when your device says 5G, but not actually connected to 5G that's even worse than AT&Ts 5GE icon.

Do you happen to know which Quectel modem is in that router?

17 hours ago, Paynefanbro said:

Looks like I was right in thinking that the update would pretty much give S20's full access to T-Mobile's network. One thing I hate about T-Mobile's network is that because they are using 2/4/66 as anchor bands and have activated EN-DC on nearly all of their sites in 5G markets, the 5G icon is pretty much always there regardless of if 5G is on the site or not.

Can a phone not connect to LTE on Tower 1 and 5G on Tower 2?  With how dispersed 600MHz deployments are, seems like this would actually improve n71 coverage on NSA devices. 

Might be a trade off worth having? Otherwise n71 coverage really goes down the toilet.

Cool

I get where dan is coming coming from. 

Sure the networks are "mergering" but it's really refarm Sprint's spectrum, shut down 3G, shut down 1x, give B26 to Dish, combine sectors, shut down towers, hand tower leases over to Dish, stop using Sprint's core, etc. etc. 

Eventually I'll stop connecting to current Sprint sites and what not.  Eventually EVDO will no longer be available. 

As these things happen, this seems like a place to put it. But it will also coincide on the flip side with "TMobile's New Network" page. 

On 4/10/2020 at 9:58 PM, greenbastard said:

T-Mobile doesn't play around. When they deploy spectrum or new technology, they deploy.

Selectively. 

2G upgrades everywhere near me only saw PCS LTE.  No AWS was added. 700MHz has been slow going.  Dropped here and there.  Taken a long time to get where it is at today.  Then looking at new deployments a lot of sites are just low band or mid band. Where my brother lives in KY, brand new deployments in his area and the sites only have AWS or PCS, not both and not 700A when they own the license and KY terrain very much needs low band.  Then I have seen other sites that only get 700A deployed.  Sites that aren't full builds are only getting 600 added and nothing else.

Will my LG V30 finally get Android 9 and also have B66 and B71 unlocked?

TMobile's could have B25 and B26 unlocked.

I think AT&T generally has enough spectrum to not really worry about DSS. 

feature request:

cloud saves between devices. 

Shentel Capex is pretty interesting.  From 2018 to 2020 Wireless capex is going from $80M to $40-45M.  That difference is going into fiber and fixed wireless along with the planned increase in capex.  

They did acquire 2.5GHz licenses of their own.  I wonder if any of the spending on fixed wireless would benefit cellular wireless? Split deployment costs across the two groups.  At least once they figure out if they are keeping their wireless business or not.  I'd imagine if they are keeping their wireless business that there would be a lot of movement on the cellular side.

If they keep the cellular business, it'll be interesting if the agreement continues to maintain the option to expand cellular into eastern part of KY.

Pop in at r/nocontract. 

Should get a lot of good feed back for exactly what you are inquiring about. 

8 hours ago, rackhivee said:

The only thing that's going to happen is they will cut down on goodies and keep the same prices, which doesn't go against what they promised the DOJ.  Pretty sure we'll start seeing our unlimitted plans throttled a few months after the merger and Dish just sucking and staying an MVNO until VZ, ATT and the new tmobile paying a premium for their wireless licenses.  Not anything diff6from the previous mega mergers from airlines,  ATT/Time Warner, ATT/DirecTV and ATT/Cingular.  All just fluff.

Yeah, I can see TMobile enabling that 1.5Mbps video throttle asap on plans that are no longer available.  My last unlimited plan was 8Mbps video.  TMobile's network would initially get crushed if all these new Sprint subs can steam full HD, lol.  Will not surprise me at all if TMobile does this.