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Where is the tower? If you drop a pin on Google maps/Earth, you should be able to get rough coordinates.

Across the road from me Mediacom marked the location for their fiber line. Not sure when they'll start putting it in. Think that line would be part of the backhaul for Sprint or completely unrelated?

Could be. Fiber design as well as LOS (Line of Sight) surveys are underway in and around Minneapolis. Although, AT&T is currently working on FTTCS and ETTCS projects in that same market.

Keep in mind, Chicago was Samsung's first market so they had to fight the learning curve, but it had just over 1100 sites. If Samsung actually acts on the lessons they learned in the Chicago deployment, Minneapolis should go much smoother.

There is approximately a 6 month transition period between when LTE is installed and when CDMA is to be decommissioned. During that time, Sprint's provisioning team (which they actually contract out, so it's not really "Sprint's team") tests and monitors the newly constructed sites and ensures a smooth transition from the old CDMA equipment to the new LTE equipment. This is all done in the wee hours of the night/morning when network traffic is at its slowest. As for turning the network on site by site vs. lighting up the whole network up at once, I'll have to do some more research.

On a side note - Verizon maintains their own network.

Minneapolis LTE is coming. There are about 800 sites in the Minneapolis/Western Wisconsin area slated for LTE. If you look at the agendas for area zoning meetings, you should start to see some sites go in for zoning as soon as early next month. Construction should start sometime later this year or early 2013 at the latest.

It did have a large part of the backbone but now runs on CenturyLink (the old Embarq company that Sprint foolishly spun off). CenturyLink now supplies most of Sprint's backhaul and is making money hand-over-fist... it was a very bad idea to spin off the entire landline business. The long distance resell / local landline business would've been fine to dump, but they shouldn't have dumped the internet mainline backbone portion of the company along with it. Embarq was the consumer landline company that Sprint rightly didn't want AND the backbone company that they desperately need today. CenturyLInk has been making more money than Sprint has been losing lately!

The thing that I can't get over is that in certain markets, Sprint can't even reach an agreement with Centurylink to get fiber access (but there were no problems with AT&T or Comcast??). All the sites that were originally slated for Centurylink fiber got switched to microwave backhaul instead. It's a different story in different areas, but that struck me as funny.

Also, from what I've seen throughout the Midwest and on the East Coast, Verizon doesn't use very much microwave. Clearwire is the by far the biggest proponent, AT&T uses their fair share, Verizon uses some, Sprint seldom uses microwave, and T-Mobile just uses whatever crappy backhaul is most readily available.