userkv8031

That is correct to an extent. But Sprint has been licensed PCS 1900 MHz spectrum in all 50 states and Puerto Rico for at least the last 15 years. So, no, the above should not be a problem inside the US. For example, Sprint has no native service in central Montana, but if you own a ranch there and want to set up an Airave, you can do so because Sprint still controls licensed spectrum in that area.

 

AJ

Going along with that I had an airave before coverage came to my area. Nearest coverage was about 30 miles away. Shortly after I go my airave coverage was turned on in the area. I still need the airave as the coverage is very weak. They still have gaps along the major roads in the area so I would imagine that those will be filled in with time which would boost the signal I get.

I love my Frontier service. I have a 35DL/35UL plan for about $50/mo.

 

Sent from my Rooted Galaxy Note II using Forum Runner

You must be on the old Verizon FiOS product. Most areas they serve are stuck at 1 or 3 mbps with 192 or 256 kbps upload. They have upgraded a few areas to VDSL but those are few and far between.

I looked at my router bandwidth of my airave when in a call yesterday and the unit only uploads and downloads at 6 kilobytes a second with one active call. Just like with voip it is very minimal, all it requires is low jitter and somewhat decent ping time.

 

Sent from my little Note2

I'm sure you will see my post in the NO thread. The ping and jitter seem to change it little outside of adding a lot of delay. I use mine on a 1/192 connection. It is more like a .3/192 connection. The pings at night are around 300 ms. During the day they range from 1000-2000 ms. The jitter can be anywhere from 100-300 ms. The connection is very unstable to say the least and it works decently. The delay is annoying but I have learned to deal with it. The ISP is Frontier...pretty much tells the story.

I totally got it thanks for explaining, but whats the numbers from good to bad ping time or I should say range?

The lower the better. My DSL sits at 300 ms during the middle of the night. During the day it is 1000-2000 ms. Both of those numbers are rather pathetic for wired service. Typical pings I see on decent connections range from 30-75 ms. Anything below 100 ms isn't bad and most things function without a delay. Much higher and you can start having a delay with realtime applications that degrades performance. To test your ping you can go to pingtest.net

I thought I would add that an airave works with my connection. There is a lot of delay and clipping but it works. My download is suppose to be 1 mbps but it rarely gets above about .3-.5 mbps and upload is a whole 192 kbps.

How am I picking up LTE this far from the cell site?

Downtilt is at a minimum until more 4G sites go live? No clue but that is possible.

80 is good im not complaining I just didnt see why we are getting 80+ when other cities usually get 50-

I would think that may improve as more sites are brought online. That should distribute the devices connecting for 4G a bit more and lower demand on any single tower and its backhaul.

In late Spring/Early summer, work should be well under way in the Central Illinois market. Some Ground Mount sites may even start sooner than that.

 

Robert

I imagine there may be a bit of a headache in some areas with the different affiliates that used to run these areas. I would guess each would have a slightly different setup. In the area of Central IL you had Sprint, Alamosa, and iPCS that ran portions of the network. I know the coverage by each varied greatly. It seemed iPCS always had the weaker signal. Not sure if it was the way they sited the towers, the power levels, or the panels but signal always tended to trail off quickly. The only sites that reliably put out signal for any distance were those that were 200+ feet.

On a side note Verizon is getting ready to build a new 250 foot tower outside of Rushville (Sugar Grove Road & Grates Ln). Must be for the 700 license as they do not own the 800 license just west of the new site. I don't think they have a 1900 license as they never built out any coverage from this area west to Quincy. Not Sprint but it is always fun watching a new tower go up.

What is the deal with those iDEN antennas? I guess I haven't seen them use omni-directional antennas before. Does anyone know how often they use the omni gear? I am keeping an eye on the iDEN towers as they have been running fiber to some of them in the area. As Nextel is the only one on the tower I don't see that as needing fiber so maybe, just maybe it is one of the select few to get converted over. I posted a few weeks ago that Sprint sent a brochure touting increased coverage coming soon for this area.

It was misplaced on some of the maps provided. The ones with actual signal propagation do show the correct location. The others have the wrong location. Thank you Dkoellerwx for your knowledge. Unfortunately where the tower likely sited is on a private road. It is a very short tower that just peeks its panels over the top of the trees. That explains why the propagation maps show no signal just a few miles from the tower. Bad thing is the signal does cover the main roads which is what was one of the objectives. The other towers are a mixed bag with propagation. One is on a flat open area and is even worse. Signal barely goes about 3 miles, I think it is low on the tower. I will probably venture out tomorrow and get picks of it. One upside to having a camera with great zooming capabilities.

Got to thinking they may have just used that site in the announcement as it is right along the main highway. You are probably right that it is a different tower. That is how iPCS operated. I had to tell them what was needed on their network as they couldn't figure out a handoff issue. The problem was the other towers needed the neighbor tower list updated. I wouldn't think that would be hard to figure out but maybe so.

If you are interested the tower I'm looking for is AW344821

I figure iPCS won't care if I give out some of the information they shared with me.

Site 821 is a ’08 carryover site and is the last of the footprint expansion sites in west-central IL

Perhaps Sprint is on another level, but those are not Sprint legacy nor NV panels.

There is no other level...this is at the address I have from when iPCS deployed the tower. I have the maps from iPCS birthing announcements and this is the tower given in those.

Edit: iPCS did use different panels compared to Sprint. This was one of the last sites iPCS installed before Sprint took over. It was thrown up in a hurry and probably used leftover parts from the iPCS panel bin. I will go check a few other places to see but there are a very limited number of towers in the city.

Now for a tower that has a mess of panels and cables. This too is an AT site but unlike the others it has several carriers. I will post a few pics but also provide the link as they have a lot of pics of the site. You can play name the panels with these pics.

Photos:

http://www.americant...united%20states

The Sprint site in Rushville, IL. These pics are also from the American Tower site as they seem to take great pics. Nothing has been done yet but these provide a great reference point.

Info from the site:

Site Name:RUSHVILLE IL

Site Number:273471

FCC 1271373

Schematics

https://ftptower.americantower.com/SiteDocs7/54491/Drawings/273471-1-1-tower-20110919_9_20_2011_11_26_14.pdf

I took a trip to another iDEN site today and you can see what I found below. I used the pics from the American tower site as they are better than what I took. Everything is still the same as the pics on their site. The site is also using communications from the local fiber provider (Cass Communications). That is a recent change as they were not the provider not that long ago.

Info from the American Tower Site:

Site Name:PRATHER IL

Site Number:274044

FCC# 1248435

Link to tower schematics:

https://ftptower.ame...10_16_21_20.pdf

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

I do have the Renegade and also really enjoy it. I have broken countless of them over the years. They all have broken at the hinge. If there was a rugged smartphone that could put up with the crap I have put my phone through I would grab one.

No 800

I didn't see anything posted for this area so I thought I would start a topic for the area. Are there any updates for this market?

Sorry for the lack of pictures. I went to Quincy a few days ago and nothing was being done at the few towers I wandered by. Time did limit how many towers I was able to go by. I did notice a new tower was being erected by Fowler, IL. I doubt it is for Sprint as they have a tower nearby. I did notice what was once a Nextel tower had all the panels removed as was the electrical service. It looks like iDEN has started to be dismantled in this area.

You can certainly get over 10 miles with CDMA in ideal deployment conditions. However, LTE on 1900 will not likely ever exceed 10, even in the best of conditions. LTE signal is too fragile beyond -95 RSSI (-120 RSRP) for your device to be able to use.

 

Robert

I didn't realize signal became so fragile at what is a common signal level. I would guess 800 would go a bit farther. Those 250-300' towers will be interesting to watch...just getting everything to the top. I bet those will be ground mounted RRU's (no 800 ) and reusing the panels if possible.

Whoa! 10 miles??? That's quite a distance! I can't wait til the one on Quadrangle is finished then!

Towers in central Illinois can do the 10 miles then another 5 generally. That kind of signal comes from the towers that are 265+ feet tall. At that height the workers should really notice the wind and sway of the tower. I'm alright climbing mountains but a tower at that height would not interest me in the least. There are some videos from some of the highest towers in the US when a person has to go change the lightbulb. Anyway, signal at that distance usually doesn't seem to be too bad unless you go down a slight hill or have some trees/buildings in the way.

Sprint is on the same rack:

Nextel License Holdings 299 ft

One good sign is that I got a few mailers from Sprint the last weeks and this that say they are expanding coverage in the area. Since they were mailed to the business I would guess they have already been thrown away. I take that as a good sign for the Rushville-Mt. Sterling area. I was getting the we are upgrading the network in your area in the coming months mailers in December. I seem to get those every three or so months so I don't think much about those mailers. Last time I got the mailers for improved coverage was when they added towers from Springfield, IL to Beardstown (IL125) and Jacksonville to Macomb (US67). The area of US24 between Quincy and Rushville is a bit of a hole in the network for this area.

Once I get feeling a bit better I will make the rounds and get some pics of the towers in this area. There are some rather large towers in the area...250 feet or so. They are guyed towers, hopefully they can support all of the new equipment up on the tower. 800 is sorely needed in this area.

Not in this initial wave. Just Terre Haute and Quincy. But I think this will change rapidly.

 

Robert via Samsung Note II via Tapatalk

I will check on sites in Quincy if I have time when I am there next. I live near Rushville and have heard that fiber is being run to many of the older sites in the area. Most of the sites are about three years old and already have fiber run to them. I guess they could be running more fiber to the towers. I'm sure not much was run the first round since iPCS tended to skimp on everything. There are a lot of iDEN only towers in this area where there is no CDMA coverage. I have been watching those as they have popped up numerous times on Sprint coverage maps as future towers. They would be crazy not to upgrade some of them as one covers the headquarters of the largest food redistributor in the nation. I know they used a lot of Nextel devices in the past, I'm not sure what they are using now.

Irma is north of me, in the north woods with little to no body there. One of those little town if you blink you missed it. Tomahawk is just a few miles north of Irma. Tomahawk is where sprint's net work ends then you're in roaming. So I wonder if they might upgrading towers south from there then?

How about the tower in Rhinelander? It shows a speed upgrade on the Sprint site. Just maybe they are installing some equipment there. I would love to see a few more towers up that way for when I make it up there (Antigo comes to mind).

Oh please. People here in St. Louis still call i-64 "highway farty (40)" many decades later. :-)

The horrible memories of driving the portion south of I-70 with the stoplights. Of course that is 61 to me since I was coming from the north on 61. They still aren't done with the 64 upgrades as now the new bridge is underway.

I-49 is kind of exciting as it is a long section of new interstate. Of course they need to finish the part in KC with the stop lights. Emmanuel Cleaver needs to lead a charge to do what is right for safety. They have major accidents there almost daily. I don't know why they thought having at grade intersections would keep the area together. The highway is a larger barrier with at grade intersections than it would be with urban interchanges.

I was in Nevada, just happened to be on my way home lol. But Nevada is part of the Kansas Market, so unfortunately no related to Joplin. Last time I was in Joplin (before Thanksgiving) there was no sign of work being done. There are a bunch of sites that are completed, equipment wise from Nevada north to Harrisonville on US 71, but no signal from them. I could even see the little green lights on the RRUs as I drove by.

Soon you'll have to start using the I-49 moniker. I believe that is official on December 12th. It would sure be nice if AR would speed things up around Bella Vista. Too bad about Nevada being in the KS market. I don't remember all of the boundaries for the markets in that area. Hopefully they get all of those towers broadcasting LTE soon. It doesn't help me since I'm still using a V950 but I do like watching the progress.

I would guess the site in Nevada is included in the Joplin roll out. Someone has been doing a fair amount of mapping in the Nevada area. They also have a bit of signal in Pittsburg, KS. It seems those Sprint towers that were also WiMax protection sites are being upgraded right away. Makes sense as it would likely have the backhaul in place. Thinking of that, another site to watch for upgrades is the WiMax site in Ozark. I have seen a lot of updates on that particular site in the last year. I used to live down the road from that site...now I'm in central Illinois.