Maxpower27

It is official. T-Mobile purchased the 700MHz A-Block from Dryad Communications a few months ago, in both the Sioux Falls and Rapid City MTA's. They have shown on their maps South Dakota expansion along the I-90/I-29 corridors, including Sioux Falls, Pierre, Rapid City and the Black Hills. See below.

 

It is supposed to be done by the end of the year. But I don't think they are going to hit that milestone. We haven't seen even permit activity yet here in the Rapid City area.

 

LTE End of 2014 to end of 2015 Comparison

 

End of 2015 LTE Coverage Blow Up

 

South Dakota Blow Up

I realize this is a bit off-topic, but I haven't seen anything about this anywhere else. Are there any new developments you're aware of regarding the T-Mo buildout in SF that you mentioned earlier?

Hi, any updates on this? I haven't heard anything else about T-Mo moving into this area and I'm just curious.

 

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Since Tmo will be deploying LTE on B12 (700MHz) and B4 (AWS), LTE coverage, capacity and performance will be great. If they add a HSPA+ carrier, it will come out of LTE B4 performance, reducing it by 5MHz. Less capacity and performance. HSPA+ will be redundant, and LTE on B12 will provide more coverage than HSPA+ on B4. No one will miss HSPA+ in South Dakota over LTE, unless they have non LTE device. Which Tmo doesn't even sell anymore.

Thanks a bunch for all the info. This is really helpful.

 

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Based on their spectrum holdings, they may do one HSPA+ carrier. But it will likely be 2G/LTE only, if I were to guess.

That would suck, but I'd still probably switch to them from Verizon as long as their LTE buildout covers the whole city decently well. They're a much more customer-friendly company. Sprint/Swiftel won't stand a chance in this town if Tmo moves in with LTE and has reasonably good coverage.

 

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It is official. T-Mobile purchased the 700MHz A-Block from Dryad Communications a few months ago, in both the Sioux Falls and Rapid City MTA's. They have shown on their maps South Dakota expansion along the I-90/I-29 corridors, including Sioux Falls, Pierre, Rapid City and the Black Hills. See below.

 

It is supposed to be done by the end of the year. But I don't think they are going to hit that milestone. We haven't seen even permit activity yet here in the Rapid City area.

 

LTE End of 2014 to end of 2015 Comparison

 

End of 2015 LTE Coverage Blow Up

 

South Dakota Blow Up

That's fantastic news - I had no idea. Does this include HSPA+ as well, since there's currently no Tmo 3g service here?

 

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Yes. However, AT&T has some serious issues in Sioux Falls. They are spectrum starved there. Unfortunately, until Tmo builds out the area in the next year, Verizon really is the only option in FSD. I go bonkers using AT&T in about half the city.

 

Until AT&T buys out spectrum from Kennebec Telephone, it just won't get better. And Sprint/Swiftel won't likely build out an LTE network anytime soon.

 

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Currently, Sioux Falls isn't even a T-mobile market (there are no towers and no stores, although I believe 2g roaming may be available). You've heard that they're planning to build out their network here? Not that I don't believe you, but I'm really curious where you heard that. Does that mean they have plans for SF to be an "official" Tmo market then? If so, that's great news.

 

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Swiftel is not likely going to do anything through the end of their agreement. It would almost be better if Sprint offered no service in Sioux Falls/Sioux City.

 

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It would definitely be better, especially as time goes on. Their 3g network here would have been unacceptably slow in 2009, let alone now.

 

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I was a Sprint customer in Sioux Falls until May of last year, when I took all 5 of my lines to Verizon mid-contract. The service was so intolerably slow (less than 20kbps a lot of the time) that I decided to contact Sprint in writing (online) to see what I could do. I had no expectations - I was mainly just taking a shot in the dark. After several emails back and forth with the lower-level reps, I finally asked to have my communication forwarded to a supervisor. I then went back and forth with this supervisor several more times (about 15 emails in total between the reps and the sup), who finally agreed to let me out of my contract and waive our ETFs. This was after I sent him several screenshots of speed tests I had run, which demonstrated how abysmally slow Sprint/Swiftel's data speeds really are here (a few of them actually showed results of 0.0kbps and were run outdoors in a well-populated area).

 

The end result was that we were able to get away from Sprint without paying a cent. All told, they waived over $1300 in ETFs because their network really is just that bad here. My data speeds with Verizon are literally on the order of 300x faster on average than they were with Sprint. After reading through this thread, I can see that Swiftel has made no progress with updating their network in the intervening year and that I made the right decision. Good riddance. I'll gladly pay more for service I can actually use.