Brad The Beast

It's meh. SNR usually sits in the negatives. RSRQ is usually -30dB or worse. I've been reporting it for over a year. I've had tickets put in. Two 5x5 carriers. They do have downlink intraband CA enabled so it's 10x5. iPhone XS which has the shoddy Intel XMM7560. Cellular does randomly disconnect but it doesn't do it enough for me to replace it.

How is this possible?! My band 26 only works some of the time. When it does work it’s usually 200Kbps download or less which is too slow to be useful. If you’re lucky you might break 1Mbps at 4AM.

Verizon has terrible congestion issues if you aren’t on a small cell or mini macro. If you’re on a small cell or mini macro it’s great.

No one else to switch to that's good.

It should help in my Grandparents area where T-Mobile only has 30MHz for LTE and Sprint has 40MHz for LTE.

100% agree. Data that doesn't work is the same as having no data coverage. I did see 26+25 aggregation here once. Haven't seen it since.

What's the point of coverage that doesn't work? I don't think I've seen any 15x15 band 71 yet. I know they were bumping some areas from 5x5 to 10x10.

I do question why they even bothered deploying a 3x3 LTE carrier. It's won't work most of the time and when it does work it'll be too slow to be useful so why even bother deploying it?

I have an iPhone which means no fun allowed.

Question for those smarter than I. If I was to buy a Pixel 3A (for example), download SCP, and throw in a Sprint SIM without activating service, would SCP work? Obviously I would have to connect to WiFi to upload data.

I have Verizon on my phone and the congestion is terrible if you aren’t on a mini macro or small cell. T-Mobile is congestion city. AT&T, just no. The thing is band 25 actually does alright. What irritates me is that even though there is good band 25 available my devices want to grab on to band 26 and I don’t know why.

TBH at this point, I am sick and tired of Sprint's worthless 3x3 band 26. I want the 10x10 band 71 T-Mobile has. I don't care anymore. I'm going mad!

Yep. You can see extra conduit behind the green box.

There it is.

Question for you all. It would appear that a new B41 small cell has appeared in downtown DTW right in front of the RenCen. It is on Cellmapper with the EARFCN of 40270, PCI of 466 and band 41 RSRP of -58dBm. You can see something that looks like it might be a small cell but it's not up on a pole, it's just on the side of a box but there is conduit laying on the ground next to it. https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3300147,-83.0409325,3a,18.7y,328.84h,87.13t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sjf7wH1t39cFa2MR41W2Tiw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 Thoughts?

I don't think there are any devices that can do more than 5 CA DL just yet anyway.

Sorry. 66 for downlink. 66 for uplink.

So looking into it, combined Sprint T-Mobile will only have 66MHz of spectrum in my area. Grandparents area is even worse at 50MHz combined. Congestion is definitely going to get worse.

T-Mobile just deployed 600MHz in my area.

Yup. I was surprised. Wausau, WI and it's surrounding areas is Extended LTE.

So in my travels I've been gathering data. I have my iPhone on Verizon and my iPad on Sprint. I haven't collected enough data to post a full report yet but this is what I've got so far out of 26 tests: Sprint Average Download: 32.22Mbps Verizon Average Download: 49.59Mbps Sprint Average Upload: 4.21Mbps Verizon Average Upload: 15.55Mbps There have been areas where Verizon kicked butt. There were other areas where Sprint took the win. There were actually a couple of places in central Wisconsin where I had no service with Verizon and had US Cellular roaming with Sprint. Once I get more locations in this report then I'll probably post it. I really want to compare them in San Diego. Edit: Should add locations tested so far. Grand Forks, ND Minneapolis Airport Central Wisconsin Appleton, WI Detroit Airport Atlanta Airport Savannah Airport Beaufort, SC

I'm connected to 15x15 band 66 with 10MHz band 13 downlink CA and I'm barely able to hit 5Mbps. This is even with all of the small cells and mini macros that Verizon has deployed. I think Sprint could win the speed game if they wanted to here.

Really? Interesting. Good to know. Although I don't know what else Verizon could really do to help the congestion issues here.

I don't see why Sprint doesn't capitalize on markets where it's the Verizon and AT&T show. My area is very much the Verizon and AT&T show. T-Mobile is hot garbage and Sprint is meh. Verizon congestion is pretty bad here so I don't see why they don't capitalize on that. I get 10 - 15Mbps around town and this is while all of the college students are gone. I can only imagine how much worse it is during the school year. I get 5Mbps max at home and at work. I get 10 - 20Mbps at home and 20 - 30Mbps at work with Sprint.