Trip

I'm one step ahead of you. - Trip

I doubt nTelos is thinking about new towers, but they should very strongly consider co-locating on the US Cellular tower on Willis Mountain in Buckingham County. It was amazing to watch the signal as I went down 15 from Dillwyn to Farmville yesterday. I started out roaming on US Cellular as I left Dillwyn. Then it jumped to a 1X 800 Sprint tower in Cumberland County, until I went behind Willis Mountain and it jumped onto US Cellular. Then I watched it try valiantly to hang onto 1X 800 from no less than four different Sprint towers in Prince Edward County while often failing back over to US Cellular 1X, and I saw it try to hold LTE B26 at -124 dBm from one of them twice. Finally, coming over the hill south of Sheppards, it was able to connect to Sprint 1X PCS from Farmville and soon thereafter connected to LTE B26 (though that tower didn't seem nearly as strong as I'm used to B26 being, maybe not optimized yet?). It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. And probably made the phone unusable for calls or anything as it jumped around and signal went up and down constantly. - Trip

I continue to be amazed at how quickly upgrades are occurring. Yesterday I drove to visit my parents and then today I drove back. On my way down, I had LTE all the way from my home next to the Huntington Metro all the way around the beltway, on 66, on 15, and then it finally gave out when I was on 29 after clinging to B26 from Buckland for a really long time. I think it finally gave up about half-way to Warrenton and flipped to 3G then. Then, again, at Opal, it jumped on B26 and hung onto it until I got to Brandy Station. Not this market, but when I got to Farmville, I was on B26 the entire time I was in town, including indoors. There was also a surprising amount of B41 additions, I saw at least 3 more towers (probably more, would have to check) running B41 than when I went down at New Year's, and that was with all the bad weather we've had. Now if only they could do something about nTelos land... - Trip

Mike, I remember discussing it, and I think it was in this thread. It definitely seems as though if no BSL is reported, the 1X site is not logged. The exception is if a site note is added while connected, but then it doesn't record any information about the strongest signal coordinates or things like that. On an unrelated note, I've connected to some Clear B41 with 09, 0A, and 0B at the end, including the one closest to my house, and I'm assuming that's a second carrier of B41. Haven't connected to it to see if it picks it up or not. - Trip

Won't try to speak for Mike, but I think the problem with this is that not all carriers treat the 3G BID the same way. Sprint seems to follow the third character rule, which I assume is what you're seeking. Verizon usually does, but some former Alltel areas I've been to seem to use sequential numbering for different sectors on the same instead. (So it goes 0x8A1/0x8A2/0x8A3 instead of 0x18A/0x28A/0x38A.) I'm also not sure how it's identifying 1X 800. If it's only by SID, then there may not be a simple way to relate the 1X 800 to 1X PCS. Not sure I know enough about that, though; for all I know the SIDs for 1X 800 may be 1-to-1 mappings to the 1X PCS SIDs. The thing I want to see changed about 1X is the bug where it won't log a 1X sector if no BSL is being reported. - Trip

Another FCC order, though not as interesting as the last: http://bit.ly/188Hspn - Trip

Not sure where this should go, maybe here? http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015/db0309/DA-15-301A1.pdf - Trip

For 1X/EVDO, the BSL gives you an offset location that is not the tower site, as Galaxyguy says. But there are generally three cells per site and they are usually grouped in some way. Former Alltel sites are sequentially numbered, while Sprint sites in my area, when converted to hex, have the third digit varied. (So 0x31AA, 0x32AA, and 0x33AA are on the same tower.) You can then triangulate the position, more or less, based on those three locations. Or, if you're on Sprint, you can become a Sponsor here and get maps. - Trip

As best I can tell, AT&T and T-Mobile have no service in the tunnels. Verizon has spotty service in the tunnel, which Sprint roams on, but there are plenty of places (which tend to be where the trains sit when "there's a train ahead of us, we'll be moving momentarily"). It's not really useful while on the go, at least not as a Sprint customer. Most of the stations have service, at least. 3G. - Trip

As I said, I'm no longer responding to this discussion. However If you hate me so much, please do not respond to any of my posts going forward. - Trip

Now I'm looking back and I don't even know why I responded. That whole conversation is off-topic. News flash, politicians take positions that benefit them when convenient. Trying to argue things aren't transparent when they follow the transparency rules required by Congress seems disingenuous to me no matter who it is. I spelled out what the procedure is. Seems pretty transparent to me unless you never want anything to get done. - Trip

Then why did you say to Google it? Looking at your link, it doesn't actually link to any evidence beyond a piece of a report and order without context and an article not actually written by Barack Obama containing pieces of letters by him that do not actually support your argument. There is no date on the R&O piece at all, in fact. - Trip

You're the one making the claim. It's not my job to do your research for you. - Trip

And was it released or not? I believe it was not. - Trip

Although I am an FCC employee (albeit an engineer who did not work on this issue in the slightest), let me make some comments on this as this may clarify things. Please note this represents my personal opinion and is not reflective of the FCC. So, first of all, to all those who say things about how Title II is the big problem, I remind you that the when the court struck down the rules under Section 706, it specifically said rules like this would have to be under Title II to be enforceable. So absent the adoption of Title II, a bunch of lawsuits and nonsense would have followed and the new rules ultimately would have been struck down again. This just skips that whole part of the process. Second, there's clearly some misunderstanding about how administrative law works. The FCC, or any other agency, issues a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) which proposes a set of rules. It then solicits public comments, of which the FCC received more than 4 million, and uses those comments to formulate a Report and Order. So to people saying "we don't know what's in it," that's technically true, but the NPRM laid out where the FCC wanted to go with it. The comments then influence the process, and the R&O explains the response to those comments and creates rules based on those comments and the NPRM. More importantly, I could be wrong on this, but I'm not aware of any case where an R&O has been published prior to adoption, at least not at the FCC. It may be a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act to do so, I've heard that mentioned, but I don't know that for sure. In any event, posting a Report and Order prior to being voted on in this case would be something new that I'm not aware of happening before. Anyway, then the document is published in the Federal Register, and is usually available online as soon as it's sent to the GPO for publication in the Federal Register. 30 or 45 days after publication in the Federal Register, anyone can file a Petition for Reconsideration asking to have the rules changed having now had a chance to read them. The FCC will then take more comments, and produce a Memorandum Order and Opinion addressing those comments and making any adjustments to the new rules based on new arguments made in comments. So if they make some blunder and a firestorm of criticism comes back, this is the chance to get it corrected. After that whole process if people are still unhappy, then it goes to court. In the Incentive Auction (600 MHz) process, I've been working with the attorneys on the MO&O the past few months. We're most likely making some changes to the rules adopted there in order to address things that were unclear in the R&O as well as things that were brought up that hadn't been brought up before. This is the normal process. Third, I suspect that many people who are saying '332 pages of new regulations' don't understand what's in these pages of documents. Any R&O contains a section at the beginning that is very long and contains summaries of what was proposed in the NPRM and summaries of the various comments received. Then the FCC explains its reasoning and why it has made decisions it has made. The actual rules themselves are usually attached to the back before any appendices and are a small fraction of the number of pages explaining the decisions and citing legal justifications for doing so. The vast majority of the pages are explanation as opposed to rules themselves. Just look at the Incentive Auction R&O as an example. The first 329 pages are discussion, then pages 330-381 (51 pages) are actual rules, then the last 103 pages are appendices providing yet more explanation. So out of 484 pages of stuff, only 51 pages are actual rules, and many of those in the Incentive Auction case are technical rules about interference limits and things like that. So, yes, are there 332 pages to read to fully understand what's going on? Yes. Are there 332 pages of 'new regulations'? I would argue no. I may or may not answer any replies to this message, but wanted to get all of that out there. Hopefully it helps the conversation. - Trip

I thought he was leasing the spectrum from Dish, which is to say, Dish is getting paid for this deployment and thus doesn't care either way what is on it or whether or not it works. Or did I miss something and Dish invested in it? - Trip

I see this too from time to time when it's caught only a piece of the data (same bug that appears to be causing the oddball logging problem) but it usually resolves itself once it catches up and gets all three pieces (GCI/PCI/PLMN). - Trip

There are definitely places where 1X is the only option, particularly areas where 1X 800 is the only thing that works (rural areas, train tunnels, etc). If I see 1X only I don't even bother trying for data. In any event, I imagine it would be hard to find your way onto 1X-only on Sprint and shouldn't be a factor in these tests. - Trip

http://newsroom.sprint.com/news-releases/sprint-signs-agreement-with-radioshacks-lender-to-expand-branded-stores.htm - Trip

Enjoy the Caribbean! - Trip

But US Cellular FINALLY won a 5 MHz paired block in the market my parents live in. Huzzah! Now they don't have to cram everything into CLR. - Trip

Tower registration doesn't really tell you anything. I would argue that most towers in use by most cell companies are probably owned by a tower company like Crown Castle or American Tower. That Verizon is building new towers isn't a bad thing, but it doesn't mean that one of the other guys isn't having one of the tower companies construct towers for them. - Trip

No matter how much longer the incentive auction takes, it's still a faster path to new spectrum than something like eminent domain would be. First of all, the incentive auction is required by law, whereas eminent domain would have a not insignificant number of lawmakers screaming at the FCC (more so than are right now about net neutrality). Second, the legal challenges to the FCC over the incentive auction are a drop in the bucket next to what would happen if you attempted to use something like eminent domain. It would be tied up in legal challenges from every TV broadcaster for many many years. Third, I'm not an attorney, and I doubt you are either, so I don't even know if something like that would be legal. If this were communist China where the government just does whatever it wants with no recourse, I'm sure it would be, but we don't live in communist China. Net neutrality, controversial as it is, at least has some precedent in the form of existing regulations on other services like landline telephones. What you're proposing does not. Finally, the FCC is an "independent agency" but was still created by Congress and has its members appointed by the President. If Congress doesn't like something the FCC does, ultimately it can undo those actions. - Trip

Construction of thousands of new towers (plus their on-going costs like rent, power, backhaul, etc) plus thousands of new encoders for broadcasters would likely exceed auction proceeds. And that's assuming you don't want to kinds of redundancy that makes broadcast much more reliable than most other media during disasters. - Trip

I'm glad you're volunteering to fund the production and distribution of converter boxes, installation of new encoders for broadcasters, and construction of extra towers to fill newly created coverage gaps. Just as soon as you let everyone else know that you're taking on the billions of dollars in costs involved we can move forward. - Trip