gusherb

I was actually back out that way today, in Michigan City at Lighthouse mall, and there wasn't even EVDO! Either it died completely or they're in the middle of upgrading the site that's right next to the mall that serves along the lakeshore and around the Lighthouse Mall. Further south where I did have EVDO it was completely useless. Interestingly when I climbed to the top of Mt. Baldy (right next to that site by Lighthouse Mall that had NO EVDO) I picked up EVDO and got 1 Mbps (could see many towers off in the distance, probably picked it up from a few miles away) I can't wait for Sprint to get these less populated area's done because this is awful! BTW T-Mobile worked great, got 7 Mbps everywhere even with no bars. They are way better then Sprint on I94 between Gary and Michigan City. (EVDO is useless on the interstate too)

On my S3 it lasted longer on LTE then EVDO. On my iPhone 5 its the same story. Standby time on LTE is not as good as on EVDO but LTE's efficiency more then makes up for it.

Yep.. Simple it is. Yep, no more android for now... Not speaking on OS type here, just functionality. I just can't get over the fact it still has just a huge app drawer. Even WinMo had more than that. Separate app drawers really benefit phones that come with lots of bloatware. IMO due to the OS's relatively light nature out of the box it easily gets away without that partition. Of course if you have tons and tons of apps and don't use folders then you are SOL. I personally do like the simplicity of having the home screen and app drawer combined. Never found the separation to be of any benefit to me on android. And just to keep on topic:

Yep.. Simple it is. Yep, no more android for now...

I like it simple.

If the next Nexus were a Motorola with high end specs (like the LG N4) and LTE all for the same 349 we see the N4 at I would snap it up in a heartbeat! (and it would be THE Android I've been wanting for years) Even if it's another LG I'll probably still go after it drooling. After experiencing Android the first time through Touchwiz and then just recently going back to iOS I think I'll stick with iOS and stock Android/Nexus devices from now on.

The Cactus and flagpole seems to be the best disguise for the cell towers. The others are hit or miss. We have 3 flagpoles around here, all are owned by T-Mobile. Before I got into the cellphone thing I actually believed they were just flagpoles... (I also didn't pay much attention either) They do have the densest coverage here because of their use of those flagpoles, since they had no problem putting them right in neighborhoods.

Well whatever it is it appears not to have been an outage for me, I just checked the maps here and the two sites in Chesterton are not shown as LTE accepted! (In fact none of the sites heading west show as lte accepted for about 15 miles) The one by route 49 and route 20 I could've sworn showed as being accepted since the fall, and now its not!? I know I had LTE when I was there in April...

I think it was some sort of an outage. I have LTE in my house in McHenry county and lost LTE and ehrp for a few hours this afternoon. Interesting that you saw the same thing. Sent from my EVO LTE Yeah that is interesting. And having the insane amounts of traffic on 80/94 on top of thousands at the beach made Sprint a complete nightmare in that area. I wonder if the outage was traffic related though. Once I got near home everything has been normal. I would like to add that since winter EVDO has slowed down a lot since it was first upgraded back in the fall in this area. Everywhere i go during the day I get between 200-800 Kbps down, before I was easily getting over 1 Mbps. I have to wonder if sprint is doing traffic shaping on EVDO now, since I thought most capacity issues were supposed to be fixed with NV. (And they were for awhile)

I went out to Chesterton, IN today for their Saturday "European market" (aka farmers market) and found that LTE was nowhere to be found and EVDO was completely saturated. We later headed over to the Indiana dunes state park, where there was a mile long wait to get into the beach, turned around and headed for a picnic area off of dunes highway to eat our lunch that we had just gotten from the market. While I was driving the call ended up dropping while I had 2-3 bars, but before that happened it turned extremely robotic for about 30 seconds. While at the picnic area I had 2-3 bars and was mostly on 1XRTT. Even EVDO was nowhere to be found, data unusable, even calls and texts took multiple tries to go through. It remained this way until about 20 miles west before I finally picked up LTE again. One thing I know for sure is that there were TONS of people in this area (Indiana dunes state park/Chesterton) but am perplexed as to why LTE was a no show!? I'm assuming there was some kind of outage. I had no problem 3 months prior at all! Today was the worst experience I've had with sprint since Chicago last September when they were just starting to light up LTE in the city, in fact today was the first time I ever said obscenities and the name sprint together in a sentence. I understand that the area was insanely crowded but even 10-15 miles out with full signal I still had no LTE! (Obviously in places that have been lit up for months) P.S. my brothers nexus 4 on TMO worked just fine the whole time.

We used to have ATT DSL and that would stay up through anything. (Except close lightning strikes would make the modem lose sync momentarily). Now the Internet is with Comcast and its already suffered one storm related outage (when the power didnt go out) People are still out around here, the local utilities site lists 20,000 still out. Down from 77,000 last night.

I'm sure someone reading this post has heard on the news by now that Chicagoland got hammered by a freak storm that almost literally came out of nowhere and toppled trees within a matter of seconds as it swept in at freakishly fast speeds. I walked outside and sat on the front porch while it was sunny and noticed some slight darnkess, 5 minutes later the sky started turning darker, and after 10 minutes I walked over to the neighbors two doors down and within another 10 minutes the storm swept in and kicked up 80 MPH wind gusts and killed the power almost right away. I was impressed with the storms intensity, it moved in and started very swiftly which is what caused all the trees to fall everywhere. After driving around assessing damage it looked like all hell broke loose! Hadn't seen one like this in 6 years at least. Of course when storms like this come through and power gets knocked out people turn to their cellphones and the networks they're on... and I'm pleased to say that Sprint was "business as usual"! (not like it was a huge disaster or anything, but damn never seen so many power outages at once from anything less then a tornado!) I (like probably thousands of other people) got on the internet and started talking on the phone right away (what better way to test the networks abilities in high demand situations?) and didn't experience anything out of the ordinary, so that was good! I was getting 16 Mbps as usual on LTE on the site by my house that I KNOW had to have had no power to it, not sure whether it has a back up generator or not I don't think any Sprint sites do (?). Also I'm not sure exactly how many hours the back up batteries are rated for but I know the sites stayed up during the 6 hours that power was out. (curious as to what happens when the power is out for 24 hours or more but don't wanna find out!) This all takes me back to when we DID have a tornado sweep through in 2008 and then floods come through a month later and it seriously crippled AT&T's network (the network I was on at the time) and signal became iffy and getting calls through was a chore. It took over a month for it to get anywhere near normal. Anyone have any reports of Sprint's post NV network during real natural disasters? (more then just a destructive thunderstorm like we had today)

I witnessed an 800 to 1900 handoff during a call with the engineering screen open on my S3 in my grandmas basement once. The call did not drop...

My EVDO speeds were bad for about 6 months, but it could've been the GS3 I was using all that time. I never saw over 1 Mbps anywhere, even though for several months prior I saw it maxing out all the time around where i live. Anyway, this is what I got sitting out on my front porch. http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/566803696 (EDIT: The correct time for the test above was approx 5:40 PM)

No issues so far for me. Currently at 22% and 6 hours 14 minutes of usage 12+ hours of standby. Used WiFi briefly and have been on LTE the rest of the time. Alot better then the first time I had an iPhone 5 (just got this one). Back in September when Sprint's network was still in shambles it was murdering the battery life.

My S3.

I spent the past weekend 6.5 miles south of Knox, IN at Bass Lake again. Down there is a real test for Sprint service as the nearest two cell sites are: one 6.5 miles north in town, and one 6.5 miles directly east in Culver. I was excited to try my phone out there again as 1X800 finally showed up on the map for both of those sites! Well come to find out for some odd reason my phone decided it would behave opposite of usual and prefer PCS over SMR the whole weekend. It took 12 hours the first time for it to finally connect to SMR, even when cycling airplane mode and I rebooted it one time and it still preferred PCS. PCS fades in and out of service indoors over there, and SMR hovers around -91 to - 100 Db, and when PCS would fade completely out the phone would switch to no service and start scanning (I opened up engineering mode at this point) and watched it scan some PCS channels, Verizon, SMR, and then back to PCS. Also SMR 800 signal was not as strong as it seemed it ought to be, I'm wondering if these sites even though showing as accepted are still being fine tuned? Other then that I had excellent signal on all the sites that would let my phone stay on SMR! Before on PCS it faded out badly since the sites on the route I take are spaced about 10-15 miles apart. EV-DO was improved in Knox, but Sunday afternoon it completely flaked out until I finally started heading back west and my phone connected to the next cell site. I could tell they had the new Samsung equipment going, at least I thought so. I have a very non-scientific way of telling (besides looking at engineering screens) When you dial a Sprint phone on a Samsung site it will courtesy ring about 1.5 times and then the ringback tone will sound just a little different when the call actually goes through. The Legacy equipment had no distinction between courtesy ring and when the call actually goes through.

It doesn't look like they have, not in my area at least. the coverage on the map appears the same on the map as it has for the past couple of years.

I'm curious as to why it had to be that way with the iPhone. I did know that when I did my testing, I forgot to mention that in my above post. I read that in one of the more recent posts, what you said. It was interesting, I don't feel like it ever let go of SMR inside the building, but I'd hope that it wouldn't considering it would've most likely dropped the call if it did so perhaps the threshold is at least somewhat high before it decides to just go and jump back on PCS? I did notice for about the past month that when calling that phone while it's in that building that calls have been going through right away and getting answered promptly, where as before it'd either be awhile before a call went though or it'd just go to voicemail. I'm glad I don't have a Sprint iP5, today while horsing with it at home the darn thing was constantly hunting between 3 bars of 3G and 1-2 bars of LTE. It has been doing that ever since the leaves grew back on the trees for the season. My GS3 drops LTE maybe once or twice a day in the house currently.

I think I was reading somewhere in this thread that the iPhone 5's latest PRL 51096 supports 1X800 so today at my mom's shop in Chicago where you can get 5 bars outside and no service inside I did the "ultimate" test for the iPhone and first initiated a call and walked towards the center of the building with it and it held the call clear just fine showing 3 bars (-88 Db approx) (previous to the iPhones ability to connect to CDMA 800 the call would have dropped by then) Then after I confirmed it was working fine I took it down to the basement, (where Sprint PCS signal is completely hopeless) and found myself holding the call but it getting choppy. Signal was fluctuating between -91 to 101 Db's. I initially wasn't convinced I was on SMR with the iPhone 5 until I took my GS3 down there because on my GS3 I can hold a very clear call with about -90 Db, but my GS3 was getting choppy just like the iPhone. Unfortunately I have NO idea how I'm supposed to confirm what band the iPhone 5 was actually using because in the engineering menu all the fields were blank while idle or in a call, but after doing the same tests with my GS3 I'm almost certain it was on SMR because my GS3 was for sure, and performance was nearly equal. Now assuming that the iPhone 5 was really on SMR 800 the performance was slightly worse then the GS3, It dropped the call two times aside from the call getting very choppy, while the GS3 would get choppy but not drop the call. iPhone 5 dropped the call around -103 Db. GS3 stayed connected at -103.

I don't see why they couldn't have just set it up with a new number then put in the port request afterwards. and I don't see why you'd need to have to take it in to "reprogram", maybe just dial a number/code sequence to update and that's it. I just bought the StraightTalk Home Phone Connect last weekend, it operates on Verizon (even the same model Verizon used until they got an updated slightly smaller model more recently) and to my amazement the sound quality is not bad at all, a novice couldn't tell the difference between it and your traditional POTS line (I surely can, though) I'm gonna set it up at my mom's shop to back up the Comcast Digital Voice lines there in the mean time but really it's for when I switch from CDV to VOIP when the contract with Comcast is up. I want redundancy as wireline reliability at the location is fair to absolutely horrid from AT&T and Comcast (the only options, and this is right in the middle of Chicago believe it or not!). So cellular is the only other option. I was really curious about the Sprint Phone Connect 2, and was enticed by the 3 months free and free device but not the 2 yr contract!

I only speak for where I live and frequent or have recently spent some time in the Chicagoland area, (south loop, and south of the loop) I used to see somewhere in the range of 6-10 Mbps, now I see 2-6 Mbps down. There have been instances in the city where LTE was unusable at times either due to weak signal and/or congestion. Though I also have to admit, the times that happened were often in places where LTE 800 was really needed, LTE 1900 wasn't up to the task (outside facing rooms in dense old high rises). EVDO and voice performance were pretty good though, I'm thinking a large amount has moved onto LTE and now EVDO has lost some of the crippling congestion! (think max EVDO rev A speeds late at night, and 1 Mbps down .5 meg up during the day where as almost nothing before) Last time I was on the north side I saw pretty fast performance, like in the 10-20 Mbps range depending on distance/line of sight. (think near Loyola around Clark and Devon) In the suburbs where I live my experience speed wise has mostly been at a plateau since shortly after I started on Sprint (coverage has increased dramatically since then of course) I average 6-12 Mbps in the house, and 2-7 up. When I'm line of sight of a site I see between 20-35 Mbps. The only place I can say out by where I live is the mall, which if you picture it everything revolves around a big old mall, a couple high rises and tons of standalone buildings and a large shopping center across the street which = very high traffic. Sprint for the longest time didn't turn on LTE at the site serving the mall and it's immediate vicinity until just almost two months ago, before that EVDO was continuously only seeing 200 Kbps and crippling latency. Now that they've turned on LTE I'm seeing 6 Mbps max, line of sight of the cell site, so they still appear to be battling congestion but that's still a huge improvement. I must note that Chicagoland is one of the most completed area's for NV. It is just now getting to a point where it's near done enough that you can start to tell where it's already coming due for the next upgrades in LTE.

It must be an anomaly for me, or another market/vendor specific thing, but I'm readily able to Force QCELP13, or even EVRC instead of EVRC-B on my GS3. I do think the stability of voice calls suffered when I was stuck on 13k, when I originally tried it I found that to be the case. Now that it's back to normal I haven't had any bit of choppiness at all. Also during that time that was going on, I was occasionally getting fast busies in the area, and still get what has got to be a bad connection in the PSTN every once in awhile (sounds like horrible distortion & background noise, the same thing happens on my grandma's AT&T POTS line every so often, you fix it by hanging up and dialing again) Oh I also forgot to mention that EVRC-B applies to 1X800 and 1900, I mentioned this some months ago and someone wanted numbers and I provided them and that turned out to be the case, still is.

I tried them out through a Tracfone. Sprint for as long as I've had my service with them (8 months now) has been using EVRC-B. They apparently use the highest bitrate available in EVRC-B (8.5 kbit/s is it?) For about a month the site serving where I live was forcing QCELP13 though, which to me sounds the same as Sprint's EVRC-B except with the annoying scratchiness that comes with the 13k codec. I can't wait for VoLTE or to get a device that supports one of the wideband codecs. I hate talking on cellphones so much that I keep calls short. I use a POTS or VOIP line (with a good quality phone) If I wanna talk to someone for awhile.

I find the exact same thing here on VZW, except I also noticed that like a micro climate effect, the VQ quality varies from site to site and area to area. Calls going through the site that serves around my house have good VQ, but out by the mall it's horrible. This same pattern repeats from site to site all around the area, in most places it's bad though. VZW is 850-only around here, with very wide site spacing in the suburbs (I hear even in Chicago) VZW is not even the most populated carrier around here, AT&T and Sprint are.