gusherb

They’ve been rolling it out very aggressively in Chicago and across the metro. It’s not as ubiquitous as it should be in rural areas here yet.

In the Chicago area.

Most of the new setups I’ve seen around here are using the KMW panels. IME B12 is only good for a call or SMS. I’ve hung onto calls for miles driving through areas that I can’t use any data. T-Mobile B12 is basically a voice-only carrier. B71 since they widened it to 15 MHz in this region will have usable data all the way out to cell edge, about 10 or so miles from the site.

No issue doing that here and this was on native Sprint.

I’ve yet to see B26 operate at a greater range than B25, and that includes the newest tri-band setups. Going from 2xB41 only to tri-band seems to have helped a bit though. Out in the rural areas it dropped off LTE a number of times while it was on B25 and had nothing stronger to grab onto. Each of those sites is Tri-band so B26 was definitely around. T-Mobile or Verizon will cling to low band for miles past what PCS or AWS will do.

Opened a Kickstart line cuz I was getting the itch to see what B41 was like these days, and my first time using sprint since April 21st 2015. The PCS layer is a god awful mess between lack of optimization and congestion, they never did do anything to increase the range of B26, but I’m impressed with B41, especially when it’s running 3xB41 with it as PCC. I drove out to rural parts of Indiana where T-Mobile loses native coverage and found myself on B41 doing 80 mbps up to 6 miles from sites as PCC and still saw it 10 miles as SCC. I can see how this is such a gold mine for T-Mobile, especially for rural areas when paired with 600. I’m super excited to see what they do with it and hope they try to build out to cover as extensively as Verizon (maybe a bit idealistic but they’ve tried to be like Verizon in every other way). Have been seeing 25+25+41+41 and 26+25+41+41 CA combos, though I don’t see nearly as good speeds on these combos as I do when it’s all B41. Also have been seeing UL CA on B41. And while driving out in the rural areas I did roam on T-Mobile 2+71 for a little bit. That’s all my findings for now.

They got another 30 MHz of 600 (60 MHz total) with it split 50/50 between 4G and 5G. Verizon got 20 MHz of AWS-3 and AT&T got AWS-4.

That sounds like it’s gonna be very painful in places where the combined have over 50% market share. T-Mobiles network in the Chicago market can’t comfortably handle the T-Mobile user base as it is now.

T-Mobile has been very busy in the Chicago area over the last year upgrading sites with Massive MIMO and B71, however in the last few weeks I saw two new macros pop up on the south side including one on a tower Sprint is on, plus others with B71 adds. Haven’t seen any evidence of B41 carrier adds to T-Mobile sites, but I’m assuming T-Mobile will just use what Sprint already has up to begin with and go from there.

Perhaps a rebirth as T5GRU?

AT&T went from the best to the worst carrier in the metro here in the course of 3 years. But since 2018 they've been working their way through downtown Chicago and upgrading every oDAS node to C-RAN and adding LAA to each of them, and they've been adding new nodes around the city. They've also been going around the metro and doing partial rip and replace jobs on macro towers adding B14 and upgrading midband to a 4x4 setup as well as adding that capability for B14.

Need help identifying this one. I’d normally assume T-Mobile but the middle panel is unfamiliar to me, not sure if that’s massive MIMO or something else.

This seemed like a rather odd placement for a small cell, on a pole in an alley. Not sure anyone's getting the best use out of it there as opposed to being along the actual main road instead.

Turned out to be T-Mobile

Yes that is the typical behavior on Verizon and AT&T. They will hang onto the call until the LTE UL to the site is 100% lost. T-Mobile will try to hand down to UMTS and GSM. (AT&T sets parameters to prevent any hand downs in most places)

Yep, time to stretch out that B26 as far as possible and make it as useless as possible for data use. Though 26+25 CA would help tremendously in fringy areas where UL on 25 wouldn't work and 26 is too slow on the DL to work.

That's a Verizon node setup for B2/4/5/13. T-Mobile often goes on those same poles with Verizon using Nokia Flexi Zones.

I'm finding it hard for me to say this tactfully because that issue just makes my blood boil, but things like this is why Sprints image is not improving whatsoever. If they can't even stop making marketing faux pas like this then that just proves to me that they haven't really fixed the management issues that plague the company. They can make their network as great as they want but as long as marketing is run by a bunch of fools and CS is off-shored to people that can hardly speak the language of their callers let alone have the correct training to resolve issues properly, they'll never get anywhere. So this, in addition to people's sour taste about Sprint already is just continuously reaffirming their beliefs that Sprint is to be avoided like the plague. I think if they had already fixed these marketing and CS issues people's opinions might already be making a turn for the better.

I can't believe nobody else got it lol. I saw the title and was like "what?" then saw the sign. There'd have been news everywhere if they had any real outages.

Funny because I haven't found a thing to watch on Netflix in months and everything I wanna watch has been on Hulu.

No I'm probably not near them. But I also don't notice many of them downtown, in the most touristy areas. I see far more Crown Castle and AT&T oDAS nodes. Do we have any maps of Sprint small cells around here, for my market or any market?

Ok here's the re-write: I don't see very many of those Airspan small cells, the ones I have seen look like this: Something I have seen ALOT of recently are these Nokia small cells, which TMO is on SOME of them, but not all. Is there any possibility Sprint has been using these too? If not, then I'm really at a loss as to what in the world they're doing for small cells since I don't see alot of those Airspan setups.

Yeah that did NOT go over well... I never did see any of those pop up in the Chicago area though. I guess Sprint probably has no choice but to go macro dense using existing towers in several places now.

Glad they figured that out. Small cells are a poor substitute for making up for bad macro coverage, but a great supplement to already good macro coverage. Verizon deployed a bunch of metrocells in my area 3-4 years back and seems to have figured out that they're pretty much useless unless one is within 500-1000' of one. They've replaced at least one that I'm aware of with a macro site.

I think that goes without saying, what I mean is Sprint can follow TMO's ability to approach the situation efficiently and get things done quickly.