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RAvirani

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Everything posted by RAvirani

  1. RAvirani
    Lots of downtilt here - they’re doing a pretty good job of containing coverage to prevent sector overlap here.
  2. RAvirani
    Looks like the Sprint site at 8th & 405 in downtown Bellevue has been converted. Huge coverage and capacity improvement.
  3. RAvirani
    There have been issues with the virtualized 5GC too. Definitely a few bugs to sort out there still.
  4. RAvirani
    The top rack is a Sprint KMW 16=port antenna and a Samsung M-MIMO unit. The bottom is an AT&T Firstnet setup. The AT&T sector facing the mall has dual split-beam antennas for capacity. The microwave dishes at the bottom are from an abandoned Clearwire setup. T-Mobile is set to hop off of the SnoPUD transmission tower and onto the Sprint rack in the "nearish" future. Dish will be joining in early 2022 as well. Verizon is also colocating onto that site (I think this is forecasted past Q2 2022 though)...
  5. RAvirani
    An RRC connection release without a destination is relatively weird. Have you tried getting a new SIM? If your SIM is damaged and misreading even a bit, that could be cause for the network to be shoving you off like that.
  6. RAvirani
    Oh boy. Let me see if I can pull the azimuths.
  7. RAvirani
    When planning to close a coverage hole, network teams use a “search ring” methodology. Upon selecting a site that falls inside the ring, they will choose azimuths and mechanical downtilts that satisfy the coverage objective. While softwares like Atoll/Planet/Asset (these are the three big ones) can provide very accurate propagation models, the models are only as good as the clutter data and clutter loss parameters (the DEM/DTM data is usually good enough to not worry about these days). For simulations (e.g. Monte-Carlo load simulations), you also need accurate traffic maps. As a result, some level of real-world testing is usually necessary to close out the electrical downtilts, exact RS ERPE per port, connection release/handoff parameters, etc. After that, there’s a good bit of testing (call/integration/etc) that takes time too. On occasion, sites may also be delayed because they don’t have back haul or permanent power. This is more often the case in rural areas than urban/suburban areas.
  8. RAvirani
    The team down there might have done more planning before site builds or they may take a more ANR-focused approach when it comes to neighbor relations. You'd be surprised how differently teams in different regions operate.
  9. RAvirani
    There’s a good bit of complexity to bringing sites online, even conversions. Integration/etc takes time because they don’t just affect the conversion site, but every site around said conversion. Surrounding sites’ electrical downtilts need to be edited, handoff parameters need to be optimized, CA needs to be configured, neighbor lists have to be updated, PCIs/PRACH RSIs need to be carefully chosen, etc; and that’s barely scratching the surface.
  10. RAvirani
    SMSA is usually the name Verizon uses for site acquisition.
  11. RAvirani
    I stopped by this site and was surprised to see that they disabled lowband carrier aggregation after the upgrade (midband was moved to the 300,000 offset eNB). I thought that site’s lowband and midband footprints almost entirely overlapped. I wonder if they’re anticipating increased lowband load from n5 usage…
  12. RAvirani
    Looks like the old CC and ATC towers at the end of 520 in Redmond are gone. There’s a new tower very close to the old ATC location with all three carriers.
  13. RAvirani
    The core networks are pretty much merged now, so market teams have started adding Sprint sites to T-Mobile sites’ neighbor lists and vice versa. This allows for smooth roaming without a total loss of signal. You’ll frequently see PCIs shaken up to avoid collisions in these areas.
  14. RAvirani
    This sounds more like a Qrxlevmin/Qqualmin config issue to me. I’ve seen T6 perform adequately below -125 dBm on a not super-clean signal. Diversity and lower modulation can do this today. The cost of switching to one of those tables (even 3 or 5) is reduced data speeds for users with strong signal strengths. As always, everything in wireless is a trade off.
  15. RAvirani
    There was talk of this close to the merger - with the CDMA shutdown, Sprint employees had pitched the idea of switching up MCS tables to push lowband LTE range closer to 1x range. E.g., Table 6 has a spectral efficiency of just 0.0034 for MCS 1 which allows engineer to push LTE range a lot, since the airlink is still very usable at low signal strengths. But, IIRC T-Mobile decided against it. I believe they’re running table 2 on lowband in most places which bottoms out at 0.1523 efficiency.
  16. RAvirani
    That’s already live in many major markets.
  17. RAvirani
    Last I heard that is still the plan. The seemingly overkill n41 coverage is due to the fact they own almost no other spectrum in the area.
  18. RAvirani
    Oh no - they will be keeping both locations. Azimuths on the existing Verizon tower needed to be adjusted to keep the noise floor low, since the T-Mobile tower is relatively close by. That Verizon tower was also way overdue for 4x MIMO and highband given the demand for data in that area.
  19. RAvirani
    That’s likely because Verizon is colocating onto the T-Mobile/Clearwire downtown site. This is actually pretty standard for height increases but I agree - it does look a bit funny.
  20. RAvirani
    Ooh - good progress! I’m interested to see what the azimuths are for the Woodinville warehouse district tower. What equipment is on the Valley Industrial site?
  21. RAvirani
    Mike and I talked about this - the close button is hidden because the content in the pop up window overflows off the bottom of the screen. A shorter message isn’t a permanent fix, but it will allow more clusters’ messages to be displayed before the issue crops up. I think Mike is working on changing the way the pop up window is displayed. That will permanently fix the issue.
  22. RAvirani
    I forgot about this - I’ll trim down the message from the web server right now.
  23. RAvirani
    Yeah - Verizon has got a lot of mmWave small cells in that area. That being said, they still have the poorest indoor coverage since they’ve only got one macro at the marina (SEA Moss Bay). SEA Feriton (on 6th by the Google campus) helps, but not a ton.
  24. RAvirani
    Great news and long overdue!
  25. RAvirani
    The 5G icon is controlled by a parameter called upperLayerIndication, which is a part of system information block 2 of LTE. A value of true just means that LTE carrier/channel supports ENDC (aka it could be the LTE anchor for NSA 5G). Without looking at engineering screens or using an app like SignalCheck, you can’t actually tell if you’re connected to a 5G radio bearer.
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