mdob07

Sprint's secondary B25 carrier trimmed from 10x10 to 5x5 today in Louisville. No change to T-Mobile's B2 here yet, but I expect it to go from 10x10 to 15x15 or maybe even 20x20. Combined they own contiguous 30x30 here plus G block now.

8 hours ago, Trip said:

Yes, that's my experience as well, and comports with what I was told by someone in the know when I asked if there was a "keep" list.

Given they had two years to plan, I'm not sure why they didn't work this out then, but...

- Trip

I wonder if these newer ones are experimental to see how much T-Mobile load they pickup and how much stress they relieve from surrounding sites. One I found today thats also new is litterly across the highway from an existing T-Mobile site. Maybe they're evaluating if they're worth keeping or not, or maybe some of these will be kept as B(N)41 only and not be a full build site. 

Edited to add picture for reference.

Looks like T-Mobile is still evaluating Sprint sites to keep, a site I pass everyday just started broadcasting the 312-250 PLMN this week. 

3 hours ago, mdob07 said:

N41 increased to 80MHz in Louisville finally. I'll get some tests tonight on my way home. 

2 hours ago, Dkoellerwx said:

Nice! Still 40Mhz here. Will be very interested to see the performance on that.

Heres some tests from a few places as I drove home, interestingly not all sites were at 80MHz, a couple were still 60MHz. Some of these were stationary and some were while moving. I was even able to hit almost 200mbps in my basement on the far side from the tower about 3/4 miles away. The last time I tested my home site at 2AM the best I could get was 525 down, so this easily tops that at just shy of 700mbps.

N41 increased to 80MHz in Louisville finally. I'll get some tests tonight on my way home. 

I'm out in Lexington, KY today and noticed that Verizon has acquired 5x5 B2 from AT&T, they now have 10x10 at EARFCN 1150, used to be 5x5 at 1125 for Verizon and 5x5 at 1175 for AT&T. Not sure if they just sold for cash or swapped other spectrum. As far as I can tell I don't see any other difference in deployed spectrum here for AT&T, so not sure what spectrum they might have received in return. 

Edited to add: Unless they can swap spectrum across different areas. With Verizon buying Bluegrass Cellular maybe they are positioning to trade for the block Bluegrass owns in the middle of AT&Ts 2 B2 carriers south of Louisville. That would keep Lexington at 20x20 and allow the area south of Louisville to go to 20x20 from the current 10x10 + 5x5.

SCP is crashing several times a day now on the newest Android update. I've been hitting the send info button when it crashes. Hopefully there's something helpful.

My AT&T S20 Ultra got a beefy 472 MB update tonight. Appears to have finally enabled SA 5G for AT&T and probably some other things as well. 

So it appears the January update on my S20 Ultra has enabled SA 5G for AT&T finally. Before the option wasn't even there. I set my phone to SA only but can't connect yet, but hopefully this is a sign they will enable soon. N5 NSA is all thats live around me currently. This might explain the weirdness some of us have been seeing with the 5G indicator and some other weirdness recently.

@belusnecropolis any recommendations on something I can put together for T-Mobile? I want to come up with something I can plug into the WAN2 port on my UDM Pro and use as WAN backup. I could always go the Cradlepoint route but I thought it might be fun to try to build something. My home T-Mobile site is fully upgraded with Bands 2, 4(66), 12, 41, 66, and 71. Size isn't too much of a concern, I'll likely attach it to the side of my rack. This is in my basement but I'm close enough to the tower to have pretty good signal down here. 

Found an interesting find today, this site was one of the earlier 600 upgrades, probably over a year ago at least. Noticed today that they are adding 2600 equipment and also appear to be swapping out the existing low/mid band antenna panel for a new one. On the latest permits around here that are adding 600 they are using Commscope FFHH-65C-R3 antennas, so I wonder if the existing one was an older revision and the new one has enough improvement to be worth replacing already. 

8 hours ago, jporter12 said:

Unless something has changed, NO. SA 5G requires the T-Mobile R15 sim, even for T-Mobile customers, from what i've seen.

8 hours ago, BlueAngel said:

Correct, no 5G SA without an R15 sim.

4 hours ago, comintel said:

Yes.

The R15 sim is no longer required according to numerous posts on the TMobile subreddit.

The reason it was required originally was that the formal 5G spec requires that the sim use encryption for 5G SA.   But T-Mobile has now modified its network equipment to accept sims lacking that encryption as well.

References to R15 being required have been removed from the T-Mobile web site.

Correct, R15 SIM is no longer required. SA 5G is working fine now on my T-Mobile S20+ with a TM9263 SIM card. I did have trouble with SA when it first rolled out up until about 6 weeks ago, but since then its been working flawlessly. My phone actually prefers SA 5G over LTE and at least 50% of the time that's what its on. 

Anybody have any idea when SA N41 will be turned on?

1 minute ago, iansltx said:

My bet is that if they put n41 equipment on, give or take, every site that currently has n71, they'd hit 200MM covered. They already have n41 in pretty low-density markets, going wide rather than deep. Wouldn't be surprised if merely providing citywide coverage in areas where they already have at least one live n41 site would do the trick.

They just added N41 to a very rural site here in KY between Bardstown and Springfield. I was shocked when I caught that live. 

On 1/4/2021 at 8:24 PM, PythonFanPA said:

Fair warning to anyone traveling to the Pigeon Forge/Sevierville area in the near term....was through there twice in our down-and-back trip between Christmas and New Years last week to southern TN to visit with my mom/brother.  There's something going on on the main strip through south SVille & PF with data connectivity.  Signal is fine/strong, and calls or texts would go through fine, but data was completely dead.  I know what happened in Nashville obviously but I thought that was affecting AT&T service and causing issues there for those users.  Gatlinburg comparatively seemed fine on all fronts when we were there, as did Townsend area.

Strange, I was just down there a couple weeks before Christmas and had no issues. Found quite a bit of N71 & N41 too. 

On 12/4/2020 at 12:51 PM, mdob07 said:

Upgrade in progress on my local water tower site, both 600 and 2500 being added. Thought I'd share since its different that the usual "tower" setup. This is also a 4 sector site for T-Mobile, a true 4 sector site in that it has 4 distinct groups of antenna, instead of using the split sector antenna on a traditional 3 sector setup. Typical B71 GCI pattern here is 3D, 3E, 3F. 40 is the 4th sector and this is 1 of only a few true 4 sector sites I've come across, usually on the split sector setups only mid-band is split. I circled the Sprint equipment in yellow, T-Mobile in magenta. And as is typical here with the upgrades all sectors have been moved onto 1 eNB ID. Previously the 4th sector was on its own ID. B41 LTE isn't live yet but the pattern would be for it to go live on the old 2nd eNB ID. 

 

Stopped by next to this site on my way in tonight to see how this site performed with minimal load, I was not disappointed. This is my fastest test on T-Mobile so far.

3 hours ago, superbluepsd said:

Lower Sprint B41 carrier is gone here in the Portland market as well.    The remaining 2 B41 carriers have also been moved up higher to 2660 and 2680 Mhz.   

Thats where the two remaining here are as well, EARFCNs 41292 & 41490. N41 was still at 60 MHz this morning here, I wonder how long before they adjust it. Honestly I'm not sure why they moved so fast if that is what they are doing, almost all of the sites I've tested don't have adequate backhaul to even max out 60 MHz, much less 80 MHz. 

I'm 99.9% sure that the lower Sprint B41 carrier has been turned off here. I can still get the middle and upper carrier but nothing I try will even see the lower one in neighbor cells or connect to it. This carrier was adjacent to T-Mobile's 60 MHz N41 carrier, so I wonder if they will be widening that to 80 MHz soon, they haven't yet. I also noticed today that I no longer get CA on the 312-250 PLMN, either on B25 or B41. I used to get B25+B25 or B41x3, not sure when or why that stopped.  

@mikejeep I noticed a Samsung/Android bug today and wanted to point it out incase someone else notices it too. Since both my S20 ultra and S20+ updated to Android 11 HSPA signal strength is reported as -24 dBm. Cellmapper reports it as -24dBm also so it looks like that's what the OS is passing through to SCP and cellmapper. Service mode screen shows proper signal strength. I sent a diagnostic report just incase there's anything useful. 

Looks like AT&T has pushed out the Android 11 update too. My s20 Ultra is currently downloading a 2507.95MB update.

12 hours ago, mikejeep said:

Serious question: can multiple carriers on the same band be aggregated?

Yes, I see AT&T aggregate multiple B2 and/or B66 carriers. One can be primary or both can be aggregated. T-Mobile is starting to add their AWS-3 to CA with PCS and AWS-1 around here now that it is widespread. I've not seen more than 2 carriers on the same FDD band in CA together. 

My T-Mobile S20+ upgraded to Android 11 earlier, so far everything looks good. I sent a diagnostics report on SA 5G incase there's anything useful there. My AT&T phone seems to have calmed down as well, I haven't seen it force close at all or freeze in over a week now. 

Upgrade in progress on my local water tower site, both 600 and 2500 being added. Thought I'd share since its different that the usual "tower" setup. This is also a 4 sector site for T-Mobile, a true 4 sector site in that it has 4 distinct groups of antenna, instead of using the split sector antenna on a traditional 3 sector setup. Typical B71 GCI pattern here is 3D, 3E, 3F. 40 is the 4th sector and this is 1 of only a few true 4 sector sites I've come across, usually on the split sector setups only mid-band is split. I circled the Sprint equipment in yellow, T-Mobile in magenta. And as is typical here with the upgrades all sectors have been moved onto 1 eNB ID. Previously the 4th sector was on its own ID. B41 LTE isn't live yet but the pattern would be for it to go live on the old 2nd eNB ID. 

Hey @mikejeep does this send anything to you when I hit send feedback? I keep having this pop up on my AT&T S20 Ultra but its been pretty much stable on my T-Mobile S20+, not sure what the difference would be. I've been using it more on the S20+ lately as I'm hunting down T-Mobile B(N)41. I'm thinking about doing a clean uninstall and reinstall on my AT&T phone and see if that helps.

On 11/20/2020 at 4:17 PM, iansltx said:

Any idea of what T-Mobile's AT&T roaming agreement looks like? The Sprint one is apparently area limited at 256 kbps. While that's not great, it's better than nothing...or 1x.

I hit quite a bit of AT&T roaming around the Somerset KY area. Was definitely throttled, the bottom speedtest is from my AT&T phone.