userkv8031

Service was horrendous today in the Rushville area. From what I saw from a distance it looked like new equipment was being installed/hooked up. Calls were dropping and cutting out with decent signal. Since I don't have a 4G phone I can't say if it was turned on but I suspect they are close to turning this area up.

i have a question to why US Cellular would leave those towers empty when Sprint could have bought them.

In the last financial report USCC it was mentioned that they are exploring what can be done with those assets including selling them. It may have been an earlier report so if I am off a quarter sorry about that. Maybe USCC thought they could lease those towers to Sprint but that didn't pan out. Outside of the recently sold markets, I look for USCC to sell the rest of the network in the next year or two. The latest billing issues and reception problems after 4G upgrades are hastening the likelihood of a complete sale of USCC. The next question becomes who will buy them Verizon or Sprint.

I would love to see Sprint buy the assets if they come up for sale as Sprint could use a boost in the rural areas of Illinois.

There are 4 actual towers in Springfield. 3 of the 4 are now installed and active.

 

Everything else that has been accepted in the area is not actually in Springfield. 

 

The remaining 20 are utility pole towers.

I lived there for several years (2009-2012) and didn't realize Sprint had so many utility pole towers. I would guess the one by the mall is Sprint...always thought it to be a T-Mobile deal.

I found the 22097 PRL to do an analysis on.   As mentioned before, the analysis has my changes I made so you can read the priority levels easier of the 1x and EVDO scans of each 1x SID.  I've uploaded the 22097 analysis to the PRL Site - http://www.batonrougebroadband.info/

Thank you for doing the analysis. I wish 800 was easier on the DuraMax. It takes a miracle for it to switch to 800. It generally prefers roaming on USCC over 800 on Sprint. Not sure why it does this unless it is the way the radio cycles as it will sometimes go from Sprint 1900 to USCC then a few seconds later to Sprint 800. Maybe I just have a flaky phone. I bought a DuraXT for the other line on my account and it seems to go for 800 almost right away then search for 1900. I noticed that when activating the phones they went straight to 800 and a few minutes later went to 1900. Activation on 800 apparently doesn't work for whatever reason. As long as the phones were connected to 800 activation wouldn't go through but once on 1900 it was done in a couple seconds.

So will LTE be faster once it's totally done? Right now sometimes you get LTE sometimes not in exact same area

Yes, right now everyone that can connect is connecting to the only tower upgraded. Once a few more come up things will probably still be a bit slow as the same thing is going on. It will take nearly all of them to be live before things level off a bit as that was an iPCS market. iPCS markets are not known for having dense coverage.

How come these towers that are Periodically LTE around Peoria and surrounding towns aren't showing on map or network vision accepted sight?

They are probably still going through testing and have not been officially accepted yet. It is also possible that Robert isn't getting steady stream of information from this area.

On another note, I have had absolutely abysmal service today. I had more dropped calls today than i think I ever had in a day. This was around Jacksonville. US 67 between Jacksonville and Jerseyville is roaming so I can't say much for that stretch. I also couldn't connect to the Jerseyville tower even with Sprint only selected. Between Meridosia and Beardstown I was pulling the Beardstown II tower for about 20-30 miles on 800. It wasn't strong out that far but it was there. I even had a call connect but it was dropping every other word. I notice when I get below about 2 bars on 800 a lot of clipping starts to happen. Probably a combination of the distance and phone I have. Once all the towers in the area have 800 things should run much smoother. On the off chance that Sprint reads this...a tower between Beardstown and Meridosia would help greatly as would one on 67 south of Meridosia just beyond the 67/100 split at the top of the hill. Not ranting just hoping that someone with some pull in this market will find this. For what iPCS sold Sprint things aren't going all that bad.

The Sprint tower by Safelite in Peoria is up and running with 4g! I kept the signal almost all the way to the bridge!

I guess I should look into getting a 4G phone. I have been patiently waiting for 4G to start appearing in central IL before upgrading. Now if I can just hold out for a tri-band device. Looks like that will only be a few more weeks. I haven't had an upgrade in years. Last I talked with the account manager he was going to give me an extra discount since I haven't taken advantage of my upgrade in a long time. 

I don't know why, but I'm set on the 5S. Well I would luv a Nokia Lumia Windows Phone device but it doesn't look like that will be coming to Sprint...are there no plans to add bands 25/26 LTE to the Denver area? At least within the next 6 months?

 

 

 

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You may wait and see what the upcoming tri-band phones offer and then compare. You should be fine waiting a few months as that will give Sprint a chance to turn more LTE towers on. During the transition the network can be a bit funky at times. 

I'm sure you've seen this: http://s4gru.com/index.php?/blog/1/entry-351-teaser-is-the-lg-d820-the-nexus-5/

 

I was in the Note 3 boat, but no tri-band=no sale. Not sure what I'm looking at now. I'm eligible in April. The Megalith is probably too big, but it is a possibility I suppose, as is the Nexus 5 if it truly is tri-band.

I too was ready to buy the Note 3 but without tri-band it is off my list. Now I have to figure out what I want. It is time to get run away from my Duramax...I absolutely hate that phone. The V950 was so much better. Just wish Sprint had an updated version with 800. Kyocera phones are no replacement for what Motorola put out in the past.

I suppose that Apple and even Samsung could have included 800 LTE at the very least since I don't think that slice of spectrum was ever dependent upon any deal that Sprint was working on over the last year plus, correct? 

I think the iPhone 5 has LTE 800 but the Note 3 does not. 800 had to be cleared of iDEN and approved for LTE and CDMA use. Since iDEN was turned off at the end of June Samsung may not have envisioned LTE 800 rolling out too terribly fast. Now that all bands are being turned on simultaneously I think that was a bit shortsighted if that was the thought. There is no reason that all phones released now are not at the very least dual band. Next year they can do the tri-band but dual band could have been a stop gap. If the Note 3 was dual band I would still be considering it.

Hey everyone in Illinois market. 

 

I was over in El Paso (got married) and then went over to Galesburg and Knoxville. I had Sensorly running the whole time on my phone.

 

Got 4G on US24 by Washington/Dee-Mac Road area as well.

 

Got 4G in Knoxville (that's my one little blurb there south of 74 on the map) and east of Knoxville on 74. 

 

Not a damn thing in Galesburg. Never made it over to Monmouth or down to Macomb. 

Congrats on the wedding. I don't think there is much to report in Macomb as I haven't seen 800 there...yet.

I also got 4g in the area for the first time today.  10-15 mb up and down 100 yards from the tower.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3t00aaca761qslh/2013-09-12%2016.29.18.png

Sensorly is now showing a good splotch of purple in the Peoria area. Maybe this means that they will start rolling things out a bit faster across the market. Hopefully they will be well along before the first snow flies or it gets too cold/windy to work on the towers. At that point work will progress slowly and cause frustration among those tired of the slow speeds.

800 mhz just outside of Peoria.   I'm still having hand off issues to and from this tower at times.

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4r4o18wppn5d42d/2013-09-12%2006.40.15.png

It probably isn't integrated very well into the network yet. I drop calls when I go from the one NV tower in this area to the legacy equipment. Until all the towers here are upgraded I expect that to the new normal. In time the network will work better.

Not to be too picky, but USCC customers will not be automatically moved to Sprint. All the press headlines saying that Sprint acquired ~500,000 subscribers from the sale were inaccurate. It was purely a spectrum transfer. Come October for St. Louis subs, or January in Chicago, if a USCC customer has made no moves to find another carrier and port out their number, their cell service will go dead (apart from 911).

 

While I would prefer that USCC remain an independent company, if the Carlson family is looking for a buyer, I would certainly prefer Sprint to acquire them rather than VZW. Sprint has needed the rural coverage badly ever since they missed out on merging with Alltel, and it's only gotten worse since all but one (nTelos) of their SRA partners (that provide pseudo-native coverage) have bailed.

 

The only licenses that Sprint holds nationwide are in PCS G and most of SMR. When it comes time to build protection sites for that spectrum, it will be interesting to see if Sprint converts any of those to full builds.

 

As for USCC native coverage, you can go to their coverage map here and zoom in until you see where there are "splotches" of blue rather than the grid for partner/roaming coverage. As far as the Midwest goes, there are large portions of Iowa, Nebraska, and Wisconsin that do not overlap with Sprint's network.

It was poor wording on my part. If Sprint sweetens the pot enough they might get a good chunk of those that remain on USCC. The problem with Sprint is reputation in some of the areas. St. Louis used to be not so good on Sprint but back then there was no one that was great. Sprint still isn't great in Springfield. There are too many areas that have signal that is basically useless or doesn't work indoors. It is a tower density issue and that would be due to iPCS. They went for covering the main roads and just enough pops to meet obligations. They didn't care if they had usable service or service that sat at -110 dB  which is unusable by any phone.

I don't place much confidence in those maps as I know of a lot of areas painted blue that really have nothing from USCC. At least they are building towers at a pretty good pace in this area. VZW is also building towers at a good pace from Rushville over toward Quincy. I guess they are using 700 in that area. Sprint had a bunch of new towers in this area at one time but they were cancelled once iDEN conversion stopped. It would have been smart for Sprint to keep those four towers as they covered areas where Sprint roams. I expect Sprint to redeploy near those towers at some point in the future. I will find it a bit funny if they use the same iDEN towers when they do add service.

Hopefully once Sprint deploys more of the NV gear in this small area service will improve a small bit. Seems they have been messing with things lately as service has been very erratic.

I'm having trouble finding the link, but I believe Sprint has at least one nationwide licence, so it would follow that yes, they do have licences where they do not have coverage. An additional licence in one of these areas likely won't change the approach, but I really have no idea what Sprint's plans are for expansion beyond NV.

That is correct...I think it was AJ that had a map showing the 1900 spectrum in MHz that Sprint owned across the US. I think it was posted long ago over at howardforums. If it was another user sorry on the mix up...not that I can even find the map now anyway. If I remember right, Sprint only had 10 MHz in some IL markets. I think this was well before the G-band was part of the holdings. Even so, that map should provide useful information in that it would show what can be devoted to 1x and EVDO I have GIS but for this exercise it wouldn't show anything useful. A better exercise would be finding detailed coverage maps for USCC (they don't exist beyond just coloring things blue) and overlaying those with Sprint coverage maps. There are a lot of areas that will go from having USCC signal to no or weak Sprint signal. The cities will mostly escape that but the more rural areas will be hit hard. Just have to hope that if USCC sells network assets that Sprint will buy them to quickly expand. I wish Sprint would buy the areas covered by SID 1914 and 221, network assets and customers. They need a big coverage boost across those two SIDs.

About the sprint putting equipment on U.S. Cellular tower they have intentions of doing so in the markets it bought from them to improve coverage and capacity. Quote "Sprint stated its intentions to replace U.S. Cellular’s aging CDMA gear with its new Network Vision architecture" (Gigaom). Link to the article 

http://gigaom.com/2013/08/29/sprint-will-sunset-u-s-cellulars-network-in-st-louis-oct-31-chicago-on-jan-31/

This is great news for central Illinois market because it will significantly increase there coverage here. U.S. Cellular has great coverage in the Midwest. I think Sprint Should buy the rest of U.S. Cellular. 

I think most of that is due to the USCC network being shut down which means those users will automatically be moved to the Sprint network which is seeing NV work. USCC did not sell the network assets in those areas...yet. As of last quarter they were looking into selling those assets. I think USCC is looking to sell a few more markets. I hope Sprint picks them up instead of Verizon. Verizon would be most likely as USCC has some cellular licenses where Verizon holds none. The Quincy area is one place where Verizon offers no service. That extends east along US 24 almost to Rushville, IL.

Statements from Sprint/Softbank does make it sound like they are exploring purchases of smaller carriers. I would have to guess USCC is on the list.

On note of 1x800...I have not been able to connect to it lately. Instead I am stuck on roaming. They could be working on getting LTE up and running I guess as I usually have a fairly solid signal on 800.

Frontier's Internet services should be completely separate from their metro-e services. Anything more than 5 ms (other than consumer grade access networks) within Illinois has a problem.

 

 

 

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I would hope so but that is not what I have been told by those in Rochester, NY. They are having issues at the edge going from Frontier to L3. WIthin IL the pings on consumer/business lines go up to 3500 ms. No reason there should be a ping that high on any connection outside of satellite. I did bother Frontier about the upload being so low (192k) and they upped it to 448k. Since that change my pings have dropped a bit. They bounce around a lot but I would say they are in the range of 200ms late night to 1000ms during the day and evening. The ping annoys me more than the slow speeds as it makes a slow speed just plain unusable.

Anyway, I did notice new Sprint antennas on the Rushville tower. Didn't look like anything was hooked up and no one was around.

Not Sprint but tower related news: Verizon is installing a new tower in this area along the area where they have white on the map. They don't hold a cellular license for the next county (Brown) over (Adams is another). I don't think they hold a PCS license there either. It looks like they are going to use 700 to provide service in that area. I'm sure someone with more knowledge of the licenses can shed a bit of light on that.

I think the hold up is backhaul right now. My guess would be that Frontier is going to be used for a bunch of areas. I wonder why they would use Frontier when they have been having major problems delivering speeds and low pings to everyone as they have overloaded servers in Chicago and then the more localized servers. I have run a lot of pings to the Chicago servers and see pings of 200-300 ms where google is 30 ms or so from the test server I used. There are times that pings on Frontiers servers hit over 500 ms. This isn't just localized congestion but the whole backbone of the network and servers that are overloaded. I have recently been talking with the main office and they acknowledge the problem but they are unsure of when things will be where they should be. On DSL I often have pings from 500-3500 ms. Lately my speeds have not been dropping off in the evenings but the high pings remain. I am not sure how the backhaul is going to be delivered when they are having server and backbone issues. At least more fiber is being turned up on the Frontier backbone.

Another issue seems to be microwave. I have noticed a lot of mini dishes going up on Sprint towers. These sites had fiber installed in 2009 so I'm not entirely sure why fiber is not going to be used going forward. It may be that the provider was unable to deliver the speed needed in the timeframe Sprint gave them. They still sell 3 mbps packages for $50/month which is kind of pricey. They may not have the infrastructure to the IP links to deliver what is needed...even with fiber. Fiber is only as good as the connection between the ISP and the outside world.

Once things do start turning on I imagine it will go fast as it looks like most of the equipment is in place at many towers. Just a waiting game for the other pieces to catch up.

I drove through Macomb the other day and I have my answer for the panels on the Macomb water tower. The legacy panels are gone so I would say they are broadcasting 1900 only through the new panels right now. Probably to get at least that part done and through before the students came back. The rack now holds six panels which is down considerably from what was there. It actually looks more organized and manageable than the mess that was there before.

Does each band have its own fiber connection? I figured at least 800 and 1900 would all run through the same backhaul, thus it would be shared. I figured 2500 would have its own connection.

I guess that would depend what sort of bandwidth they are ordering. Gigabit links would likely be divided up since they should have a bit of room to do so.

I was in Macomb today and the network was extremely slow. Voice also seemed weak in town. I guess they could be working on the water tower (near WIU) where they have a rack full of legacy antennas. In order to do the upgrade it looks like they will have to remove at least one of those antennas per sector. I would think that would cause a decrease in signal quality. I don't know if they would need more than one antenna per sector on that tower or not. I think they even stuck antennas on each corner. It is something like four on each side with one on each of the three corners. Most towers I see just have the corners loaded up but this one is just loaded all the way around. I think if they added another tower or two in town they could better manage the traffic and provide better service.

I don't know what's going on in Decatur but data speeds have been significantly slower than usual. I can't even send a picture while I'm out. And web browsing...Don't even bother try doing that lol. I was barely able to get to this site and post.

Somebody tripped over the ethernet cable and no one realized as the legacy network is that slow in some areas. I hope things improve soon and that at the minimum some 3G upgrades come along.

He said they have 15 crews in the area

 

 

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Adding to them getting so many towers done is the fact that the first few take longer. This has been observed in all markets where it goes slowly at first but picks up as the crews become familiar with the equipment and the checklist.

Any news or info about NV in Champaign/Urbana?    All I know is that 3G data speeds here are somewhat better than 6-12 months ago, but still not great.    I'm still using my ol' faithful HTC Arrive... I like Windows Phone and was waiting for the WP8 devices on Sprint, now the dilemma is whether to grab an Ativ S Neo or wait for dual/triband LTE phones.

With the announcement that all sites will see 2.5 added I would wait for a tri-band device. I was thinking of a new device once I move from this area but I will wait until a tri-band device comes along. I have waited so long for an upgrade that a bit more doesn't matter to me. Last device I used my upgrade on was the V950 and that kept me happy until Sprint replaced it for the Duramax. Only upside to that deal was the addition of 800 voice. That has made my phone usable at least.

Central IL Market has a few 800SMR sites...Actually there is one in Vandalia which isnt that far.

The other is just outside Rushville and Beardstown. I connect to that tower the majority of the time. Makes for headaches as no other tower in the area has been upgraded leading to dropped calls. I'm on the edge of the upgraded cell and where the Rushville tower picks up. Just hope that when they turn on 800 they do more than one tower here and there.

This is the Network Vision upgrade which includes LTE and 3G. I would guess that everything is done since there was no room for the legacy equipment to be in place while the new equipment was installed. Service was worse than normal for about a week. I also drove by that area during that time and there was no service less than a mile from the tower. The only bad thing is that calls drop between the new equipment and the old equipment at surrounding towers. In this case doing a cluster wouldn't work seeing as this is the first tower to go live in this area. They seemed to have picked the one that would be a bit more complicated. All of the towers within about 15-20 miles of me had fiber installed in 2009. I would guess the backhaul in that respect is fairly easy since it was installed long ago. 

Sexy tower pictures from the Frederick II (looks like Sprint renamed it Beardstown II) tower on Rock Quarry Road and Old 67. That is between Pleasant View and Frederick, IL. It is kind of a strange tower for such a rural location, short. There is no legacy equipment as there was no room for both. That would explain the drops from that tower to any other in the area. I didn't get good pics of the cabinets due to the weeds and thorn bushes. I did drive by the tower in Rushville and the cabinets were installed there also but nothing new up on the rack.