RAvirani

Any chance you were able to map them on Cellmapper or something similar?

Not data. Your phone is only displaying roaming because of the 1x roaming signal. Data is native. Don't go over your voice roaming limit though!

Could you elaborate on your findings along 2 in Montana? This is news to me.

NR is the technical name for 5G. Think WCDMA/UMTS or EVDO for 3G.

That site (SE03XC157) is triband enabled. It was upgraded last year. I suspect the speed increases you're seeing aren't because of any upgrades to that particular site. Rather, the site in the Check Ride Driver Training Services parking lot (SE52XC053) was upgraded from legacy Clear equipment to triband recently. That has taken a lot of load off of surrounding sites and improved coverage greatly in Town Center area.

Which site in Woodinville? Are you referring to the one by the town center (by the AMC, Target, etc)? Yes, all of the towers along Avondale are triband-enabled barring one Clear site. Backhaul has also been upgraded on all of those sites. There is a new site in planning on Avondale between NE 116th Street and NE Novelty Hill Road. Fingers crossed that site gets built!

It looks like it's 800 only. I only see a Samsung 800 RRU.

That 900 MHz spectrum is owned by pdvWireless. That is the 3x3 MHz block of 900 MHz spectrum Sprint sold off.

That must be a configuration error. Those LTE carriers are adjacent and should be combined into a 10x10 carrier centered at EARFCN 8640. It may be a good idea to reach out to someone at Sprint about this.

Email marci@sprint.com with all of the technical details. Your email will get forwarded to a network engineer.

The Sprint LTE network throughout Oregon is VERY well optimized. I wish Sprint's network team was that good everywhere. The bug is likely a Samsung bug. It may be a good idea to reach out to someone at Sprint and inform them of it.

I double checked and your phone should utilize SRLTE at all times when LTE roaming (I believe even when the LTE and CDMA provider's are the same although I'm not 100% sure). There may be a software/config bug if your phone isn't. Does toggling airplane mode in the roaming area cause SRLTE to turn on?

What do you mean a VoLTE enabled area? I thought you were roaming... I'm confused what you mean here...

Interesting. I haven't had issues dropping from T-Mobile LTE to USCC CDMA to recurve/make calls on my iPhone. I believe they using SRLTE, not eCSFB, though... Did the problem persist if you disabled VoLTE?

Found my first two M-MIMO sites in the area: SE03XC104 (located by Wild Waves in Federal Way) and SE03XC278. They are both broadcasting five L2500 carriers.

Sprint's plan is to deploy standalone NR with EN-DC, as they don't suffer from the same uplink issues mmWave deployments do. This is effectively an NR PCC aggregated with LTE SCCs. That being said, I don't know if we'll see SA or NSA NR for the initial launch. Judging from the upload speeds in the screenshots I've seen on various Sprint engineers twitters', I doubt the initial launch will be SA NR...

Verizon's NR deployment is NSA (non-standalone). They are using LTE for uplink. Think of it as an LTE PCC aggregated with a downlink-only NR SCC.

The roaming agreement with T-Mobile includes LTE data only, not VoLTE. Handover of a Calling Plus call is possible and has been documented, I believe. That being said, latency is often problematic as roaming traffic is always routed back through Sprint's network. VoLTE calls are trickier. They can be handed off to a similar-to-Calling-Plus data session on T-Mobile LTE, although they would face the same latency issue. I'm not sure if this has been documented yet. A side note: my iPhone 8 often drops to CDMA for a few seconds before kicking over to T-Mobile LTE, making a smooth handoff impossible, although I've witnessed iPhone X and newer devices transitioning directly from weak Sprint LTE to T-Mobile LTE. A handoff may be possible in these cases.

Sprint has enabled EN-DC on their NR network. N2500 will be aggregated with L2500 from launch day. VoNR will be deployed, although I don't know if it will be live on launch day.

Take a look at the official four launch cities. 5G coverage is displayed there.

Sprint updated their coverage map today. It looks like the public map is now displaying 5G coverage!

These were the next devices planned for VoLTE launch on Sprint.

Pixel 3/3XL/3a/3aXL are all VoLTE-capable on Sprint.

Happy to help!

If you update your phone through iTunes on your computer, iTunes should download the latest carrier bundle. I'm not sure exactly which folder it gets stored in on Macs as I have a PC, but you could probably figure it out if you dig around a bit. If you can't find the carrier bundle, I believe Apple maintains a website with all signed carrier bundles as well... Once you have the bundle (which should be a .ipcc file), add a .zip extension to it. You should then be able to extract the files in the bundle. In the Payload folder, the file called carrier.plist has all of the juicy stuff you want. The best way to poke around or edit this file on a Mac is probably to use Apple's Property List Editor. If make changes to the bundle and want to load the updated one onto your phone, you can do so through iTunes. Open terminal and navigate to the /Applications/Utilities/ folder. Then run the following command: defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool YES This will launch iTunes in carrier testing mode. You can now option-click (or shift-click on Windows) the Check for Update button when your phone is connected to your computer. This will allow you to pick a .ipcc file to load onto your phone.