gusherb

Yeah and as I'm right about to leave town to an area that still has NO Sprint LTE anywhere near it for a month or so. This is why I've been thinking about switching to one of the Big Two but sprint EVDO in town and Verizon roaming everywhere else should suffice. Plus I have att and VZW SIM cards for my iPad Air. I hope when I come back band 26 is nearly everywhere as well as the second PCS LTE carrier! If they can get these band 25 issues nipped I'll be able to hold off on a tri-band phone for awhile, which is what I want to do because I don't trust that the iphone 6, getting a redesign as big as it is will be without major teething issues for the first few months.

This is really cool. My cousin was just telling me how a lot of people she knew on the southside and south suburbs had no service a lot of the day yesterday. I suspected something big was going on if there were outages, and since I was hearing about USCC spectrum being sighted I suspected that could've been it.

Yeah back before all the NV 3G upgrades were complete I'd disable it so I didn't flip back and forth between native and roaming constantly. Now since I had to turn it on last when I left native coverage, I've just left it on.

My eyes get stuck up in the air when someone on Verizon tells me they're afraid of being charged for roaming, and I tell them a million times that Verizon's domestic roaming is all you can eat with no added cost. I can't imagine how non-techie Sprint users must feel. Most of the time I'll see roaming turned off on their phones.

If that's the case they should've had it done yesterday! Time to get my whip out *whachaaa!*

LTE at the corner of Main st and Calumet Ave. about a mile and a half between two Sprint sites. And EVDO at the corner of Main st and Indianapolis blvd. strong LTE here but you can guess what happened between my last speedtest and here....you guessed it band 25 faded too much! Plenty of places around here that need band26 just to stay connected outdoors on the road. Sprint has better spacing then att but only optimal for PCS voice and EVDO. Verizon spaces there sites about 6 miles apart around here.

That's actually where I was just at, the Jewel. They have three carriers on two towers next to the Texas Roadhouse, and then a Verizon site is a 1/4 mile away on 213th across from Briar Ridge. Munster puts on a great fireworks show at Centennial park. That was actually the first time I ever experienced sprint LTE crash. EVDO crashed too, only voice worked.

Calumet ave and route 30 in Dyer has never had any speed problems. Albeit I'm line of sight with a -82 db signal but I've been line of sight of many other sites and the highest I'll get is 15-20 Mbps from them.

Band 26 still humming along around 33rd and Halsted in Chicago. I forgot how well an empty LTE carrier can perform even with weaker signal.

I'm glad I sent my N5 back and got a 5S. Dual band is better then waiting on pins and needles for months for tri-band to be activated!

Band 25 is still struggling during peak hours in NWI, especially in Griffith, and Cline ave around 80/94. We need that second PCS LTE carrier bad! It seems they've forgotten about us over here, I guess we get to wait now, since we were one of the first places with NV initially. In other news, band 26 is still humming along at my mothers shop. I connected right away a few minutes after I walked inside.

Every time I go to consider T-Mobile I feel like the rug keeps getting pulled out from under me, first they raise the prices, then they raise the price of unlimited, and now if you look at broadband reports they seem to be under the impression that the Simple Choice plans will now get cut off instead of throttled when you run out your data allotment with this "abolishing overages" announcement. That kind of pisses me off I'd rather have slow data then none and be forced to pay for more. I see where things are headed but I feel it's a painful transition in the meantime for the customers, if you do all the numbers everyone is seriously raising prices. Ironically under the guise of lowering them, just shifting numbers around. It would cost us more to switch to TMO then ever before, same for Sprints Framily thing (which I truly shudder at the idea of having to recruit new customers in order to keep my bill down, everyone hates Sprint around here!) plus every time I do the numbers I just don't see any savings once I tack on unlimited and EasyPay. Same goes for att too, but they've always been expensive so that's nothing new, and verizon I won't even go there... T-Mobile has a great network around here but I despise the fact that I can go a mere 10 miles south and drop down to 2G, Sprints coverage is leaps and bounds more extensive in Indiana, especially with LTE getting turned up, and LTE 800. I also don't like that T-Mobile never came to my house with its LTE footprint, it's not like I live anywhere rural I'm only 3 miles south of I80/94! I hope Sprint doesn't try to force us off our EPRP plan anytime soon, hard to beat two fully unlimited lines for 130 dollars. It's the only thing that has kept me with them the past year besides our contracts. (I try to keep quiet but yes I've gotten very impatient with them lately.)

I was getting band 26 Thursday and Friday near south loop.

Samsung...

I have a feeling the signal I'm picking up is coming from around China town, which has been a known black hole for most carriers for years. I'll be happier when they get band26 enabled on the sites nearest me, I'll be able to sustain LTE in the basement! As it is now LTE drops out (on 800), and PCS is weak but usable for calls and texts down there.

33rd and Halsted. Signal seems to be coming from east of here.

There's band 26 at my mothers shop! It took a few minutes to connect, then I walked toward a window, it went to band 25 then dropped to 3G. A few minutes later it was back to band 26, long enough for a speedtest then it went to band 25 again, currently hovering on 25 with around -116 db signal. I wanna see if it will hand off from 25 to 26 on its own instead of drop to 3G again. EDIT: it handed off just fine this time as soon as I started using the phone, and this is the fastest I've ever seen a speedtest get where I'm sitting, even when band 25 was relatively empty.

1.5 rings before calls come through to our iPhones usually. At most 3 rings in a bad signal area. When I used a Sprint S3 it took the same amount of time before it rang through, as well as my Nexus 5 that I had, so Apple hasn't caused any noticeable lag in receiving calls by doing it the way they did in my educated opinion. Att and Verizon also have delays before calls go through, att is network side and I'm not sure about Verizon. T-Mobile is the only network (aside from att 2G) that doesn't have any sort of courtesy ringback tone when calling a TMO line.

I can't wait until band 26 reaches all the places I frequent! I can think of more then a handful of places where PCS LTE on their rather dense network just doesn't reach that I'm always at! (and anything less then 3 bars of EVDO is usually useless) I hope they get this done quickly as my patience are run very thin. (Especially when the big two have only beefed up their networks here and made it that much more enticing to switch back to the one I used to be with) I will be in the city tomorrow, fingers crossed I can sight some band 26 but not holding my breath!

On my way back home, now knowing where I would find band 26 I got to witness it switch from band 25 to 26. I wasn't in the engineering screen when it switched but I could tell, I had two bars of band 25, watched it dwindle to 1, then it sprung back to two. I opened the engineering screen then and saw it was on B26. Eventually I got so far that B26 faded and that was that (I was on useless 3G after that) This was somewhere north of Lafayette, I wanna say around Remington, on I65. and on the same subject, I cannot wait til B26 is fully lit up on the stretch of I65 between Lafayette and Lowell, IN! Sprint sites are rather sparse along this stretch and getting a usable internet connection is next to hopeless on PCS, you could barely hold a call even. (that parts fixed now of course) Pandora played all the way from Bloomington til just north of Lafayette with no interruptions at all, then it would pause for up to 10 minutes at a time. Oh and I forgot my point from earlier, the handoff from B25 to 26 was seamless, and it appeared not to wait til B25 was absolutely 100% dead. I do like that the network will be controlling this on a sliding scale, just as long as they can get the algorithm right so it doesn't end up like when I had an iPhone 4 on at&t and it would lock onto PCS when CLR was absolutely necessary.

Well today I got to experience what 1x800 is like when your in a rural area and cell sites are lacking, I already have experienced how wonderful it is for inside dense buildings. I traveled from Bloomington, IN east to Nashville, IN in Brown County. Between there and Bloomington there are no sites. What was awesome is that I was connected to 1x800 almost the whole way there instead of roaming on VZW like I would've if it were still PCS only. The terrain is very hilly so signal gets blocked easily, I did eventually switch to no service a few miles before town and finally had to enable roaming, but considering that from Bloomington to Nashville is 16 miles through hilly terrain with no Sprint sites in between, that was great! Now if they'd just get LTE800 enabled quicker that would be better! I'm starting to tire of all these LTE dead spots I discover all over the place in towns. After that I traveled to Lake Lemon, a place tucked even deeper away in the hills and I was still picking up 1x800 but it faded a lot, finally had to let my phone roam instead. One thing I observed and would like confirmation, is the latest iPhone PRL now allowing 1x800 over roaming? I know a year ago SMR was way last.

The rest of the way down that was the only band 26 I saw. Kinda disappointed, there's so many dead spots where it'll be very useful. Guess I need to wait longer...

Just picked up LTE 800 26 miles north of Lafayette, IN heading southbound on I65! I was just about ready to lose hope because I had nothing but 3G or 1x until just a few minutes ago.

Until I cough up the dough I'm gonna have to take a drive! Fortunately what I consider the start of the boonies (the cell companies do too) is only 10 miles from here. I'll probably be in the city sooner though, and can't wait to see if I pick up anything! I'll be jumping for joy if I pick up LTE inside the building where my mothers shop is located. The place was a black hole even for 1x up until maybe midway through last year.

I just got an iPhone 5S yesterday and so far no band 26 sightings for me in NWI near my home. I'm working my way towards Premier sponsor, but in the mean time I'm gonna take a wild guess and assume the majority of active band 26 sites is either live in Chicago or further out, in the boondocks.