gusherb

I'm excited about the shutdown! My neighbor complains to me about his crappy *Sprint* company phone whenever I bring up cellphones. The other day he told me he didn't have any service on I80 or something in some spot, I said to him "well if you really lost service then you should've roamed on Verizon or US Cellular, so you must not have roaming turned on or something".....So he brings his phone out, and I look at it and sure enough it says Nextel.... I laughed and told him that is NOT the Sprint network he is on! Anyway apparently they have shut down a vast amount of coverage, just going by how much my neighbor complains hahahaha. That tower I posted a picture of months ago by my house is still live though, the phone had full service when I saw it. So anyway, I can't wait for them to shut Nextel down completely! So Sprint can move on with deploying the rest of that awesome SMR800 spectrum that has helped my service inside dense urban buildings and rural area's dramatically since they began deploying it. As for my neighbor's company Nextel phone....I imagine they've already got a contract in line with AT&T for PTT phones or something (highly doubt Sprint, apparently they tried it back when they were a mess and ended up switching back to Nextel in the mean time)

I had that same "bizzarro AT&T" experience in Colorado. It was almost surreal that I consistently got 5 bars everywhere I went, and decent HSPA speeds too. Like many places, what I was used to was their network in Chicago which felt very "piecemealed" and botched up. Service quality was very inconsistent. I always have a consistent voice service experience on Sprint wherever I go, LTE as long as I'm connected is very consistent, EVDO is the only thing that swings all over the place.

I know for a fact that many of the sites around here were live before they were "accepted" BUT, I'd find myself getting kicked off those sites often. I'd connect in an area that was accepted, then travel to somewhere where the site I was currently on isn't "done" yet and get kicked off it eventually.

I just finally got around to checking out the site map. All the sites around where I'm located either are marked 3G/4G or 3G/800/4G. Not all of them have 800 turned on, of course. I'm getting a much stronger signal on SMR800 which is coming from a site further away then the closest PCS site. Also the site nearest Chinatown has SMR800 too! (anybody that's been to Chinatown knows it's always been a black hole)

It had no problem connecting to 1X. Didn't attempt to pull up anything but I assume it's fairly usable for what it is. EVDO speed has been making a slow improvement as LTE coverage has been increasing.

Another update regarding SMR 800 in my neighborhood: Sprint's finally got it turned on near my mom's shop in the Bridgeport neighborhood! (Chicago) Now I'm finally getting to experience what SMR 800 is like in an urban setting, and I'll tell you it's just like having AT&T or Verizon again in that regard. I can now make a call from the center of the building where as before I either roamed or just couldn't get a call out. I also now get about 2 bars in the center of the basement, and can successfully make a crystal clear call or send/receive texts. (Before it would be stuck on no service, and no calls or texts whatsoever) Also as a result the signal strength doesn't fluctuate as wildly as it does on 1900.

Looks like none for me

I manually tried updating the PRL last night but no success. Got stuck in "checking for update" the first time and the second time said none was available. Today my phone decided it wouldn't connect to LTE starting at 2 PM so I did an update and got 25012 and LTE back. and to sum it up, what were the changes in this PRL, anything big or just more SMR800 additions?

Yeah my example is pretty much line of sight, flat open land. I know how bad it can be, even on 850! We had AT&T previous, the serving site was 1 mile from our house. There is alot of forest and houses between us and that tower. For years the service was always great, pretty decent signal. Something changed, and even with 850 the service from that site became unusable much of the time.

I stayed connected to SMR 800 for about 15 miles past the last shown-live-with-SMR site on the maps here, along the route I took. If no other sites were live at the time then that's about how far out I was able to stay connected. I seem to recall my signal strength slowly dropping on SMR 800 as I went further east from Kouts, IN where that site was (hope I'm allowed to say that) until it got to about -101 DB or so and then connected to the nearest 1900-only site.

Well that's because it is and isn't. Not every site in my area has SMR 800 live yet, but most of the sites along the route I took to my destination did. The site serving at my destination did not have SMR 800 turned on yet...

Took a little weekend trip out to my great aunt & uncles cottage on a lake in Knox, IN, a little rural town. Was connected to SMR 800 til about 3/4's of the way there and coverage was fantastic as you would expect! I remember back in October I barely had any signal on this little back road I took, now it's quite good. After that coverage was ok. Once I got to the cottage signal was pretty sucky, going back and forth between 1xrtt and Evdo, the serving Sprint site is 6.5 miles from this cottage. Average signal strength inside was -102 db, not much better outside. Phone was flip flopping between the Verizon site 2 miles away and staying connected to the weaker and less usable Sprint signal 6.5 miles away (this is where I would have liked to just lock into Verizon!) Albeit slow I was able to surf and download photo's on VZW 1x, after hearing what I've heard I thought it would be way worse... This place will benefit greatly when they get SMR 800 turned on, it's a fringe area on the map and it is in reality too. T-Mobile had NO service at all, nearest site was in a town several miles away. AT&T? nothing but 2G/Edge even though get this......there map shows 3G all around the area!! (go figure!) So it goes Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and very distant last T-Mobile for service quality out in this rural Indiana town. AT&T did have the best signal strength on the lake though, and that was it.

Figures AT&T would be number 1 in Chicago, kinda surprised Sprint is ahead of Verizon though. People around here seem very brand loyal towards AT&T, and I can't convince a single person to switch away either (even though they aren't that great around here!) and nobody likes Sprint (gee I wonder why?) too bad the "sheeple" are incredibly slow to figure out they are making a great comeback here.

Sprint 3G is pretty good at 2AM on Lake Shore Drive by the loop in Chicago! Much much better compared to the 150 kbps I saw at 7 this evening hahahaha. What a difference a deserted network makes.

25009

I connected to 800 late last night, went back to 1900 when I went into Chicago then connected back to 800 when I came home. It's nice to compare notes as to when were connecting to CDMA 800! I didn't know if it was my phone being weird or Sprint blocking/unblocking it alot.

Same story here, I lost it for a few days, then late last night I found my phone roaming while still connected to LTE (USCC) and then after it switched back to Sprint (1X must have gone down, my phone has NO reason to roam in my home) it was back on CDMA 800, and it will stay connected everywhere for a day or two then drop again...

My iPhone 5 back when I had it (for a mere 5 days), 3G would constantly stop working, would just freeze up after a certain amount of time or after a phone call longer then a few minutes. My mom had the same exact issues on her iP5, she still has it and it received the carrier update a few days ago and it appears that addressed the issue, though I haven't checked it much to really see, but 3G worked fine yesterday when I tried it.

Now that I've been connected for over a day to SMR800, since Sprint unblocked it all over town it seems, I've been having fantastic coverage! (not that it was bad before!) I've done a bit of running around yesterday and today, went to a christmas party in a small town 16 miles south of here where there is alot of nothing in between there and here and found myself with strong signal the entire way, and then 5-6 bars inside the restaurant I was at. There was a road with a dip in it that before you would drop a call because the signal got so weak there, not anymore with SMR800 on. I can't wait til they get SMR800 going in the rest of Chicago! Sprint will finally match (or exceed) AT&T's indoor coverage.

Originally our iPhone 5's wouldn't work without the SIM, then a few weeks into it (just one at that point returned mine long before then) the CDMA side started working fine without a SIM.

Staying connected to SMR 800 all over town, like I did when I forced my phone onto it. It's so far staying on band class 10/channel 476 during calls too, I'm sure that may change when the carrier gets filled up with devices. Service option 68 during a call just like when on PCS...

Today is the first day my phone has connected to SMR800 without forcing it. Sprint must finally be unblocking some of the sites. Have 3-4 bars at the gym now instead of 1-2.

Today in Daley Plaza at the Kristkindlmarket there was hundreds of people if not some thousands. There was no LTE but 3G was getting .4 mbps down and about 100 kbps up. took a few minutes each to send an MMS (as opposed to taking forever to not even being able to send one). Not bad for so many people and being downtown! One block over on State street outside Macy's ( Fields) I had LTE and got good speeds (didn't test them) Inside Fields was another story, they apparently have no DAS in their basement!? I could only get service in the cafeteria and near the main escalators, kinda annoying as just a few months prior I got full service all over that building on AT&T...speaking of that a family member i was with had 4 bars of AT&T LTE down there... I was able to get somewhat usable internet speeds where I did have service in their basement though.

There is one Sprint site I go by all the time that appears to use microwave backhaul, or provides it to other sites further east. The one where I live doesn't use microwave, there is a whole slew of AT&T fiber that goes right by that site so I imagine they probably use fiber on that site... The rest of the Sprint sites I see around here don't use microwave.....and now I'm gonna be paying attention for that next time I go out... hahahaha.

I have a GS3 and a family member has another line with an iPhone 5, I regularly compare them, and while I see the iPhone almost always reading a stronger signal in fair to good signal areas, I see them perform equally in poor signal conditions. If I go for instance into my mom's business which is in a typical (for Chicago) old 3 story building with 12" thick brick they both start reading the same in db, calls die out at the same spots, calls won't go out if you walk past a certain point into the building etc. I've seen the same behavior in a very rural area that was right on a fringe spot for Sprint too, and the GS3 has a slight advantage IMO because it will switch to roaming faster then the iPhone.