userkv8031

Mind getting some Sensorly on next time you're up in McDonough Co?

That is a no go as I have a DuraMax, I don't even know where 4G is located just where antennas have been added. I have noticed most of the areas in the western part of the market seems to have the 3G side turned on. I gauge that by picking up 800 and actually being able to make a call and it being stable. Signal has improved a bit but it is very finicky. Move an inch and it will go from decent to nothing on 800. I hope they get that fixed when they turn up the other towers in the area. I have noticed that calls will not transfer from the Rushville tower to any other around it. I would guess since these towers are fairly rural they are not doing the cluster roll out on the 3G side of things. Another issue I have is my phone will drop a call on 800 to move to 1900 while connected to the same tower. Very annoying and it is not suppose to work that way.

On the sprint site there has been a lot of upgrades in Springfield...could they be LTE?

Most of the upgrades are getting backhaul in place for Network Vision to take place. There are probably towers that have some equipment on the ground too. I haven't been around to look in Springfield so I can't say for sure.

Any NV news for Galesburg/Macomb/Peoria/Bloomington?

I would think Macomb is well underway as those sites have had fiber for sometime now. That was installed back when iPCS was still in charge of the network there. The tower on the east side of town appears to have the NV antennas installed. If I remember right the south side (WIU) antennas are on the water tower. I would hope they are working on that one but I'm not sure how they are going to do that without disrupting service. They have that rack completely filled with antennas (4+ each side). Earlier in the thread it was mentioned that speeds are getting better in areas in Bloomington. That would suggest that work is taking place on the backhaul.

Think you might be able to get a picture and a better location? Would be interested to know if this is one of the few iDen conversions.

I will if I make it over that way. I live about 50 miles from that tower so I'm not sure how soon it will be. Usually if I have to go that far I go to Springfield. There is an iDEN tower on that route too in Ashland. Not sure but I think that is a tower to be converted. I would hope so as signal in that area on CDMA has always been bad. I did notice antennas with RRUs near the top. At least I think that is an iDEN tower. ATT uses a similar omni antenna to iDEN in this area. Different market but the Harrison, AR tower is going to be a convert to CDMA. I find that interesting as it will be an island of coverage.

Noticed that SID 22439 is consistently being picked up (i.e. my phone is stuck on it) today around Rushville.

From other threads on this forum I was under the impression that 800 would be up before they cut iden?

There will not be many places that see 800 go live before iDEN is turned off on June 30. That is the final cutoff date for iDEN. On that date they will be shutting down switches in rapid succession. I guess they have a kill button on a computer in Oklahoma City (Network Operations still there?) to shut the whole network down in a matter of a few hours.

I think I found an iDEN only site having RRUs installed today. The antennas are already on the tower. I don't remember seeing this tower on any map for conversion/NV. The tower is near Camp Point, IL.

Think all their focused on now is ditching iden by months end. Springfield has been up and down on 800. But the data speeds and signal quality has noticeably improved. Call quality is still up in the air as is dropped calls. The wife's iPhone seems to not run well where my s3 is fine.

Those working on NV are not the same in charge of shutting iDEN down. It sounds like all that is going to be done is the switches and equipment will be shut off remotely. Then over the next few months they will be hauling the equipment to the recyclers. As for quality I ran into a dead spot yesterday right next to a Sprint tower. The network will be in flux until they are completely done in town. 

Yes, we have spoken about those.

Missed it...I need to come to the Missouri area of things a bit more.

My point was there is NO 30mbps connection available here other than Charter Communications....

Anyways, 30mbps connection on a cell phone is blazing!! (nice to have the speed but probably not necessary).

They can have att put the fiber in the ground. I live in a rural area with no choices beyond Frontier 3 mbps speeds (was 1 mbps but complained and they upped it). A totally different company laid fiber to the rural sites (Cass Communications). What is available to a consumer/local business is drastically different from what is available to companies like Sprint/Verizon/att. They do pay to get that kind of connectivity though. Local businesses can get that level of service but it costs a lot. I believe it falls into the enterprise solutions category.

I love Panasonic. Sold them for years when i worked in sales. Leica lens, OIS, and my one that I am borrowing(to show my wife the value)has 18X optical, 28mm wide angle lens.

Yay a camera thread...I have an old Sony H7 that takes great pictures. I would love to have a DSLR as I have pretty much hit the limit of what I can do with my camera. I often shoot on full manual as I have finally gotten it down on what to change for what I am going for.

I guess I should talk about towers or something here...anyone notice the purple on sensorly around Hannibal and Shelbina?

I saw someone climbing the Sprint tower in Pleasant Plains, IL today. Looking at the old iDEN tower in Ashland it appears that new panels have been installed. I also noticed a 22XXX SID today on my phone on IL103. That would have to be either coming from the Frederick II tower or the Beardstown tower. Frederick II is nickname that iPCS gave to that particular tower.

I was initially excited that Berrien county was getting LTE and based on the tower spacing I saw in the sponsor's forum thought the coverage would be fine.  Now that I've gotten an LTE phone and  mapped everything on sensorly it's very disappointing to me.  Towers broadcasting about 1.5 miles before you lose signal completely, or clearly seeing a tower and not being able to get LTE off of it, etc.  The worst part is the site locations are so poorly thought out.  There's a half mile dead zone in St. Joseph: t's the entire business district where everyone who works in St Joe or Benton Harbor eats lunch every day.  Literally the worst spot to have a dead zone if you want anyone local to use your service.  Half of downtown BH is dead or unstable as well.  Verizon has a tower right there, plus a tower right in the St. Joe business district for great coverage of both, PLUS has panels at or near every Sprint site.  Looking at sensorly, it's obvious they have almost twice as many sites in the area as Sprint despite being 700Mhz vs Sprint's 1900Mhz. 

 

Is this just an area where Sprint thought, "we don't have enough subscribers and can't compete with the big two so we won't even try?"  Or will 800Mhz LTE eliminate the dead zones?  End rant.

Much of that area was run by an affiliate of Sprint known as iPCS. There was a bit of corporate Sprint in the extreme sw corner of MI, that didn't extend up very far along the lakeshore. iPCS had horrible spacing in some areas of MI and is likely what you are seeing. I think I had the same experience when I was there 5+ years ago. Hopefully with 800 coming online there will be some better coverage coming along soon. I know in areas here in IL iPCS did some rather horrid siting like placing towers in valleys then expect that signal to travel 10+ miles. Towers are spaced 15-20 miles apart in this area which is a bit of a stretch.

Im wondering if Sprint needs to have there fiber connection sped up because in the morning i get around 8-15 mbps and around the day it drops to what i call 3G speeds and it ends up to be around .50-3 mbps. It's hard to facetime over this connection because sometimes the ping is around 100-300. And for the people that are going to tell me use wifi, i cant because all they offer in my area is ATT uverse and that is even barely usuable for web browsing. 

Sounds like they haven't turned on all the sites in your area yet. As they turn on more sites it should spread the load out more and reduce the load on any one site. Hopefully that is the case and you will start seeing some improvement soon.

Springfield is finally showing speed upgrades on the network.sprint site. One tower had 3 speed upgrades in the last 6 months, must have been having a lot of speed issues. When I was in Springfield a few days ago I did notice that I was able to check the weather and such rather quick. No waiting pages just appeared. I checked out a few towers best I could from IL125 but couldn't see much. Likely just fiber being installed right now. I know one vendor in this market is Cass Communications, glad they are providing some of it as they do get things up and running pretty fast. They ran a lot of fiber to the towers from the Macomb area to Astoria/Havana and over to Pleasant Plains when those were installed in the 08-09 time frame.

I've always had good service in those areas too. It's possible they were working, doesn't usually knock out service though as they leave the Legacy equipment running even after NV equipment is installed.

 

You don't get service at the 65 interchange? I get LTE at that interchange coming up from the Sedalia towers... 

There's also a tower a mile or two west of the interchange as well, though geography may block some of the signal. 

Geography right there plays a big role in the signal drops in that area. The tower to the west is on a hill but is blocked by the hill/trees to the east near the junction. Continuing east from the junction that small valley usually drops service to even lower levels. That is a spot 800 should fill in nicely. The other areas I was puzzled by as usually the service is great but there was none. I think Sprint has a tower in with that large group of towers four or five miles east of the 65 junction as signal is usually pegged right there, this time nothing but roaming. Not sure if they had an equipment issue or they were working on switching things over and ran into a problem as it was still out a few days later. The other area around Boonville seemed to be up and working on Thursday when I came back through.

I travelled down I-70 from Kingdom City to Bates City a few days ago and found a few areas with no service. One area was from the Missouri River to the rest area in Boonville. Area two was from Blackwater exit (curves) to near the 65 junction. Not sure if they are working in those areas but I have always had service along both of those stretches. The only area where I usually see a drop out is around the 65 junction. It would be nice if they would put a tower there or north of i70 toward Marshall.

Same in Michigan, there are only a few naked towers out there...

Going to be a lot of naked towers in west central Illinois

no joke, i just posted in another thread that i went to st louis this week and almost the whole route through south east iowa was 1X instead of 3G. same thing going to MN, get past ames and you lose 3G again until MN.

If you take avenue of the saints after you get through Waterloo it goes to 1xrtt. I found a lot of areas where the voice network just didn't work even being next to the towers. Sometimes it wouldn't go through and other times it would go through but would be so choppy it was pointless. It is like the equipment is barely functioning. I didn't stop and look at any of the towers but I would imagine the equipment is rather old and takes up large amounts of space. I have had 3G in SE Iowa in the past so maybe a bit of work is taking place.

I'm excited for some of the 1xrtt towers in Iowa to finally see some upgrades. Those seem to be mixed among the central and eastern market. I was one some of those towers in the eastern market and had trouble just getting voice calls to go through. Things along the 35 corridor were okay until I started getting close to the MN border then things went downhill fast. The network is having issues with both data and voice.

And to think with all the BFE areas around me, I haven't seen one site fed via microwave here even if it is only accessible by boat either.

 

Sent from my little Note2

Maybe they enjoy the challenge?

Going back to voice quality here...I have noticed a big difference between my old Moto V950 and a Duramax. The sound quality of the Duramax is very tinny and distorted, even more so when loud. The V950 was clear and seemed to have more of a dynamic range (a bit more of the low range). Even when the V950 was loud it was still clear and had the dynamic range intact. I think Sprint needs to pressure the phone manufacturers to include better speakers on all models of phones.

Central Illinois market is officially under way now. First three sites accepted yesterday. Sites are shown in the Sponsor NV Sites Complete map.

 

Robert via Nexus 7 with Tapatalk HD

Surprised they have gotten anything done with all this rain. Glad to hear it is underway and I hope this improves the signal which seems to have dropped off according to the coverage maps. I have experienced it with my phone but as I posted elsewhere the radio isn't working right.

Sorry, I don't have any updates, but do you really have a Renegade? I loved that phone!

Well my Renegade is being retired. The radio is on the fritz cycling between service/no service once a second. Sprint tried to pull information from my phone across the network and was unable to access it so they are swapping it out for a DuraMax. As long as it works I will be happy but I don't expect it to be anything like the Renegade which has been one of the best phones I have had on Sprint. It will be sad to pack it up and ship it back when the new phone gets here.

Sorry no news on this area outside of what has been posted already.

If they keep going lower they might have to put pull out antennas on our phones again

 

Sent from my little Note2

A lot of those phones also had the plug in the back for external antennas. I miss ext. antennas as they help immensely in some areas. All of the various bands seems like it would start raising compatibility issues between carriers. I can see 600 being helpful for Sprint if they ever plan on expanding to rural areas.

I know the FCC has been debating a spectrum screen but I thought they were thinking about excluding frequencies above 2 GHz or something around there. That makes sense to me as it takes a lot to build a mobile network with such a high frequency. I don't expect to see LTE on 2500 in more rural areas except at protection sites.