tommym65

Patience. It'll change.

And it did change: Does Robert ever actually sleep??

Updated to 2.09 this morning. The app promptly crashed on startup. My GS3 was getting 4G at the time -- I am right at the edge of 4G where I live, and it flickers in and out -- so I went to airplane mode and restarted. The app ran fine, showed blank bars for GSM (!! - I have a CDMA phone) and Wi-Fi, but showed a filled-in bar for LTE with RSSI -87, RSRP -118 (told you I was fringe). Exited airplane mode, app crashed. In a couple of minutes, my 4G dropped out, I restarted the app, and it ran fine. The next time 4G dropped back in, the app crashed.

[irrelevant aside: I don't know which is more frustrating: Living on the edge of 4G for 2 months while the Samsung contractors do other things instead of upgrading my local cell, or having a GS3 and playing with the Server Cell parameter trying to figure out which tower(s) I actually connect with, because I can't get to the cell ID parameter which shows the physical ID. (BTW, and also not actually relevant to this thread, but for those who understand LTE cell identifications: The sector ID's appear to not always be exactly offset by 169, at least where I am. There are only about 4, maybe 5, LTE cells detectable near me, yet I am getting about 8 or 9 variants of Server Cell on my GS3 debug screen, and some only vary by values of 3 or 4 or 5 from cell id's that I have previously seen. The parameter description in the API documentation seems to document some leeway in this regard.)]

Back on topic: Please keep trying. I know it's hard to debug for the GS3 when you don't have one.

Gotcha, so it uploads the data I record. I was hoping it saved my maps on the phone.

Sadly, no. It has been requested.

The sector info is there but not by a normal api. You have to request it from the baseband then parse it out.

That sounds easy . . .

Lite version: Sent you a crash report: I get 4gLTE only intermittently on my stock JB 4.1.1 GS3, and when I do, the app consistently crashes. Seems OK when LTE is not present. Now if Samsung would only update to a release that allowed access to the Sector ID info . . .

And, thanks for this, it will be very useful.

I know everyone wants to know about their town. But, I'm pretty much about to jump ship from Sprint after 10 years. . . .

 

So, I guess my questions are when will we see LTE in St Louis? And, even if it were tomorrow, would it be another year before the coverage was even complete/decent? Because it sure looks like AT&T is there now. I would be willing to give Sprint a few more months, but not if it will be spotty when it is delivered. And, if we haven't even been mentioned, it leads me to believe we could be looking at mid to late this year at best.

If you were a sponsor, you would see that there are current Network Vision/LTE installations going on in Hannibal, in and near Columbia, and also multiple sites actually in St. Louis.

Based on my experience in Chicagoland, once the installations have begun (as they have for you), the progress has been rapid and comprehensive. Chicagoland was totally dark in late August, and as of today more than half of all Sprint sites in the region have LTE. I took the train northwest from downtown Chicago today, and got virtually non-stop usable LTE for over 40 miles. Pretty good progress in just over 4 months.

So, don't be too hasty in switching. If you are, you may miss a huge improvement in your cellular experience.

I buzzed it twice with no luck. I got some speed tests too. The Irma tower, and that is.

 

Sent from my EVO using Tapatalk 2

Or, you may be a victim of the dreaded "EVO LTE New Market Curse", where the EVO doesn't reliably transition from 3G to 4G in areas where 4G-enabled towers are not densely populated. The Irma Tower being the only Sprint LTE cell in just about forever, your phone simply may not have made the switch, and you would have needed to perform the increasingly popular and exciting "Airplane Mode Dance" to actually see the 4G (especially exciting if you are driving an 18-wheeler near the speed limit [of course you are driving near the speed limit, no respectable S4GRU-er would drive OVER the speed limit!] on I-39).

Drat! I have this irrational, possibly insane , urge to see some purple, centered on that darned Irma Tower, which is especially weird because I live hundreds of miles away, in a region with lots of 4G LTE (and also lots of places where there ain't no 4G LTE, even where you are surrounded by it), and there is no earthly reason why I should even remotely care.

Oh, well: C'MON IRMA!!!! FIRE UP THAT LTE!!!

While we're sharing code, here's what I hacked together from the SignalStrengthDetector source on GitHub. It's not great but it should at least allow you to see if your phone (running 4.1 or later) fills in the CellInfo and CellIdentity classes or not.

 

https://github.com/l...rength-Detector

 

Here's the APK (no guarantees, only tested on Nexus 4 and Evo LTE, may do strange things on other devices, don't email me your output, yadda yadda): https://www.dropbox....omeActivity.apk

What is the app supposed to display? On a stock Jelly Bean GS3 I get only an empty screen, with the title "Signal Detector" and 2 small bars at the bottom labeled "Cancel" and "Submit". "Cancel" . . . cancels. "Submit" doesn't do anything. Have I loaded it incorrectly? Is my GS3 simply incompatible with the app? Have I missed something critical?

Thanks, both for posting the app, and for your answer when it comes.

If you have a sprint lte phone check out Irma

And map it on Sensorly, if you can.

Is the coverage map suppose to default to display your location? Whenever I click the coverage map for Sprint LTE, it displays New York, City. This also happens when I'm mapping a trip and click view maps.

 

Let me know if there is a setting I need to change, but I've looked around and couldn't find one.

This also happened to me after my last Sensorly upgrade, about 3 or 4 days ago. Seems to be a bug in the release.

 

2 follow-on questions: 1. Does the IIRC show up anywhere on the GS3 engineering screens? It seems like this field is the only way to actually pin down the LTE cell ID, and I can't find it on my GS3.

Too many acronyms.

Does the Sector Cell ID show up anywhere on the GS3 engineering screens? The GS3 Serving Cell appears to be the Physical Cell ID, not the Sector Cell ID.

Later: Actually you answered this on Dec. 20 in another thread: No. Oh, well.

 

There are two IDs defined for LTE sectors and sites, and Sprint towers broadcast them both. There are no lat/lon coordinates broadcast for LTE.

• The Physical Cell ID, an integer between 1 and 507, is broadcast for each sector. This value is available on Samsung devices' LTE Engineering screens (labeled there as the Serving Cell) and on the Field Test screens on iPhone 5 handsets. Empirically,k we have discovered that the three sector IDs on a typical tower are offset from each other by a value of 169. (For example, 148, 317 and 486.)
  
• The Sector Cell Identity, a 28 bit integer/ This value is displayed on EVO LTE 4G handsets' LTE Engineering screen (IIRC, it is also labled Serving Cell.) The EVO displays this ID as a 8-digit hexadecimal value, but only the rightmost 7 digits after the leading zero are significant. Within those 7 digits, the first 5 digits are identical for each tower. The last 2 digits are 01, 02 and 03, representing the sector. The iPhone also displays this ID, but converts the value to an 8-digit decimal integer.
  

The only way to relate these IDs to Sprint site IDs, and thus to geographic coordinates, is to physically survey and catalog them in the field. This is being done in Sponsor threads for certain areas, notably Austin and New Orleans.

Boomerbubba: Thanks for your reply, it seriously helps my understanding. I should have been clearer in my post that I knew that BSLAT & BSLON were for the 1X transmitter, not LTE.

2 follow-on questions: 1. Does the IIRC show up anywhere on the GS3 engineering screens? It seems like this field is the only way to actually pin down the LTE cell ID, and I can't find it on my GS3. 2. Does the GS3 LTE Engineering Screen show LTE parameters even when the LTE signal is so weak that the phone is locked to CDMA? When I looked at the screen while in my house, it was showing an RSRP of -119, I believe from a transmitter about 3 miles south of me, which I know has LTE, while CDMA Field Test app was showing CDMA and Evdo RSSI's in the 90's, I think from a tower about 1.5 miles northeast which doesn't have LTE yet.

(LTE is so close that it's like Chinese water torture! Drip . . . Drip . . . Drip . . . )

Again, thank you for your reply.

Which leads me to an LTE question: I know that the engineering screens, the CDMA Field Test app, Netmonitor, etc., get and report the sector ID, and that it is the 1X ID, and they also get and report the BSLAT and BSLON, thus pinpointing the sector logical location (and the tower physical location in some places, including northern Illinois). LTE must generate some sort of ID field, in order for the phone to know what antenna it is connected to. Is there any way to find that LTE identification (if it exists), so that you can determine what different LTE antennas are seen by the phone, even if you can't directly see their locations? At least you'd know if you were seeing the same antennas, different antennas, new ones, etc., etc.

[Oops, accidentally entered, then deleted sponsor info. Sorry.]

What? You mean like it was all a dream? S4GRU never existed, and everyone here was actually a VZW sub in real life?

 

AJ

Or maybe we are all just tiny flakes in a giant snow globe . . .

Chicago market is 75% completed according to the running list located here.

Some work has been completed at 75% of Chicagoland NV sites, but fewer than 50% are complete, and fewer than that have LTE at this moment.

When somebody says "ethernet", I think Cat 6 UTP. Which seeing as that (along with the same standards e.g. 1000BASE-T) are only rated to 100 meters... makes it not seemingly particularly useful.

"Cat-6" is a form of copper twisted pair. It is useful only for local area network segments. It can support very fast Ethernet (up to 1 Gbit), but it has virtually no relevance to mobile telephony.

Regardless of what "somebody says", Ethernet on modern fiber, microwave, coax, and even satellite media can move enormous amounts of data very, very quickly and for very long distances. Essentially all modern public communication (read: "The Internet") uses the various IEEE Ethernet protocols in transmitting and receiving its data.

Maybe we need some clarification here: "Ethernet" is the data protocol which provides packetization and error checking for whatever data you may want to transmit: Ethernet can transmit voice, video, html, or any other type of data. Ethernet can be carried on virtually any type of physical medium, including copper, coax, fiber, and microwave. The type of physical medium may determine the maximum and sustainable speeds of transmission, but does not determine the format or content of the data. Older cellular technology tended to use specialized, proprietary data protocols, primarily because Ethernet imposes a fairly large amount of overhead for error checking, addressing, etc., and the older physical media (e.g., T1) were so slow that using the Ethernet protocol caused unacceptable delays or loss of data. However, the newer physical media are fast enough to easily pass large amounts of data (including high quality standard voice and, in the future, VoLTE) using Ethernet. Thus, worrying that "Ethernet" backhaul will be too slow for "4G" communication is like worrying that leather seats will affect your car's brakes: It's comparing apples and boomerangs.

I'm contemplating a move from St. Louis to Chicago, and the promise of the new network that's 75% complete had me holding out hope that there would be a solid network once I got there. But unless the 25% they haven't done includes most of the north shore, Edens, Kennedy, and I-55 corridors, I'm extremely disappointed. What would explain this?

Additionally, although 75% of Chicagoland sites have had some NV work done, far fewer than 50% are NV-complete. Thus, a given site may have 4G LTE or 3G improvements or 800 voice, but may be waiting for additional improvements.,

[Robert: What the heck are you doing posting replies at 2:45 in the morning? You, young man, should be asleep! ]

 

If this guy has a lot of money, Do you think he might just want to fix that tooth of his as he smiles, let alone build out a LTE network?

Better to take a byte out of AT&T and Verizon.

At Lake in the Hills Airport this morning:

I had 3 consecutive tests over 30 Mbps, so the download speed is not a fluke. I could see the tower from my car window.

LTE is slowly creeping to the Far Northwest Suburbs!

No. LTE solves ALL of life's problems. That is why we are all addicted to this forum.

I have it on my iPad, but its the iPhone version. Works awesome.

It works, but seems to have very limited resolution. You are better off loading Google Maps into Safari, then having it place its icon on your iPad desktop.

Here is some crow I'm happy to eat. . . .

I can't stop myself. I just can't stop myself! . . .

Ebenezer: You, boy!! You, in the street!!

Boy: Who, me, mister?

Ebenezer: Yes, you!! (A remarkable boy! A delightful boy!)

Boy: What 'cher want, mister?

Ebenezer: Do you know the poulterers over in Irma Street?

Boy: I do!

Ebenezer: The one with the fat crow hanging in the front window? Well, tuppence for you if you run over and have them deliver that crow to the Bob Herron Family on Sprint Lane! And double that if you do it in less than 5 minutes! (There, that should take care of Bob and Tiny AJ and all the Herrons!)

Sorry, I just couldn't resist, in the spirit of the season and all that. And you, Robert, are a true and honest gentleman. You cannot imagine how much S4GRU folks appreciate your effort and attention to detail. (Irma? Why that's just up County Road J from Gleason. EVERYBODY knows that!)

. . . But now I'm getting jealous that my home still has no LTE coverage, unless I'm outdoors carrying the phone open palm, sometimes the phone camps on the LTE network. . . . when can I expect to get strong LTE signal strength in my house? I wish I could find out exactly where the Sprint, Nextel, Clearwire, and US Cellular antennas were so I could at least reassure myself that in a year's time, one of these other non Sprint LTE antennas will come online.

Become an S4GRU Sponsor and you will be able to see the exact locations of Sprint towers in McHenry County, and their exact current status. (A hint to the non-sponsors: There are many Sprint towers out here in far suburbia, but the number with operating LTE is somewhat low.) Also, the Sensorly.com Sprint 4G map is a very good indicator of where 4G is all over Chicagoland, because lots of people seem to be doing the mapping. Verizon has better 4G here, but AT&T coverage currently appears to be no better than Sprint, and may not be as good.

Also, current Clearwire antennas show up on Clear.com's coverage maps, if you drill down to the right map resolutions. They are often not co-located with Sprint antennas.