JonnygATL

Oh how I wish we had a map of planned (band 41 mini macros and small cell) sites like before (with NV). It would be amazing. Sources, come silently forward!!

I don't think a greater retail presence is the most important issue, either.

 

Also, soccer just isn't the massive phenomenon here in the United States that it is in Latin America. As much as Marcelo loves the sport, he's barking up the wrong tree. Sprint and its storied and highly frustrating history of being "almost there." Or maybe "trying too hard"?

I don't think Marcelo was referring to VoLTE when he said "next couple of weeks." I think that was in reference to the other requests unless I'm reading that wrong.

I've had the same thought.

Can confirm -- currently living in Ratchet City, and we didn't see any band 41 LTE anywhere in the market until these started popping up this year.

I was mostly kidding. Taking a satirical stab at an unfortunate financial situation. We can cool our jets.

Given this use case, I'd really, really love to see these blanket Lexington, KY in band 41 goodness as they really need it. I have heard some isolated reports of folks connecting to it but whenever I am in town I cannot seem to find any. As a rapidly growing city and home to a major university, they could use the added capacity these mini macros would bring.

Adding 2.5 to macro sites on the cheap since they can't afford to purchase and deploy every site with 8T8R gear.

 

#rachet

Perhaps I haven't looked recently at the Sprint coverage maps for middle and south Georgia but, to me at least, it looks as if Sprint is showing much more rural coverage between Macon and Valdosta along the I-75 corridor.  I've not driven that portion of 75 in years - partly because brown skin doesn't do well in those parts (I've seen "Get Out," thank you very much) - and partly because Frontier airlines has dirt cheap fares to Miami.  So I'm usually flying over it.  For any that have driven it within the past year, would you say that the actual coverage improvements match Sprint's estimates or is this overstated 75 corridor coverage?  

I truly believe he meant pops covered even though he said sites. I could be wrong. There is no solid proof of this except my observations in the southeast and mid west parts of the country. Example being when network vision was 70% complete I seen LTE over 50% of the time anywhere I went whether Memphis, Miami, Orlando, Atlanta or the middle of nowhere. I don't see that even today on b41. So if he was indeed telling the truth then I am unimpressed with how much further b25/26 can go compared to b41. I mean most of the time I clearly see the towers don't have the equipment but still.

I'm not hating on Sprint. I see work is being done like the 15x15 and other innovative things. I'm just saying that other carriers tend to move faster than Sprint in most situations when it comes to execution and it shows in LTE reliability. I have never seen a carrier neglect towers for as long as a period that Sprint will. My point does still stand that Sprint has more towers that have not been upgraded for years than any other carrier. I know of tons and tons of towers that have had the same capacity for the last 3 years and that's just the towers I have seen. I'm just saying Sprint cannot afford to ramp down capex anymore and expect to have happy customers.

 

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They do need to execute better.  For that, they definitely need more $ though.  I guess it's sort of akin to Tmobile's initial focus on urban markets (to gain more customers and, ergo, more $ to funnel into capex) before moving into suburban and rural areas.  I'm glad for Tmo...I really hope they do meet or even, ultimately, exceed Verizon's coverage footprint.  It would be an interesting development as it pertains to competition.  

 

But to revisit Gunther's "70%" remark, I honestly never found that the least bit confusing.  It was quite clear and obvious what he was referring to, as others have also pointed out.  He was not at all talking about 70% of total Sprint sites but, rather, solely 70% of Sprint's sites that were LTE-enabled at that point, as he clearly said.

 

So, say only half of Sprint's sites are LTE enabled (the # is greater than that).  Say that # is 25,000.  So 70% of 25,000 (LTE enabled sites) is 17,500 (sites with band 41 enabled).  So if Sprint's total site count were 50,000 then that means that some 35% of ALL of Sprint's sites have band 41 active.  This is all fairly simple math. 

 

I don't understand why anyone found that confusing.  But, yes, that # needs to expand greatly..and quickly.

Günther was pretty specific in his phrasing, and lilotimz further clarified it. I don't think he meant POPs.

 

This upcoming Earnings Call will be telling as far as Sprint's CapEx plans for this year. We're either going to be satisfied with their answers or we won't be. I don't want to prejudge, but Sprint needs to figure out how to really open the spigot and not spend its money on satire videos which have pretty low view counts. Seriously, look at the channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7VOn09ACtvRfMPQzazOZzw) and see the number of views for these videos. No comments last I checked either.

 

 

The metrics don't lie on customer engagement, no matter how many times they run the ads.

 

UPDATE: Here's the Video View Count 3 Hours after uploading:

 

76 Views

61 Views

68 Views

113 Views

83 Views

126 Views

 

The channel itself has 6,872 Subscribers.... which is not very many at all.

 

Now look at the view counts of the other posted videos on that page. Except for a handful that really took off and got thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of views, it's pretty low numbers. I just don't see these ads "going viral". I just don't. What a waste of time and money in my opinion.

Agreed.  I find this honestly just...bizarre.  It leaves a general taste of profound "WTF???" in one's mouth.

I am almost to the point of being over it, I am at home now couldn't even use my phone for music on the drive home as LTE just went offline. Still offline, 3G is unusable, had to listen to FM. *shivers* This has been happening a lot lately, unacceptable.

Every carrier has their shitty areas. If I lived in an area where Sprint were shitty, I simply wouldn't have them. Lucky for me, Sprint is fantastic here in Atlanta. So why don't you just switch to a carrier that performs well in your area? Only seems logical.

I have driven from Wisconsin to Florida mulitple times.  I have not lost any signal, 3G yes, but never a no signal on Sprint.

Me niether. I-75 all the way from Atlanta to Dayton, OH is mostly LTE.  Small patches of 3G.  Significant portion is even band 41.  Except for parts of Kentucky where you'll stay on bands 25 and 26.    But no Sprint signal at all? I haven't encountered that in years (outside).

That's f&$#ing ridiculous...in a good way!  I was just there a few weeks ago in Louisville (love that city, btw!!) and regularly stayed north of 45 mbps and even hit over 65 mbps on one occasion but as my GS6E is not 3xCA capable, I never saw anything close to this craziness.  Glad to see it though.

My first 200+ mbps speed test in Louisville:



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Yeah, we can definitely agree on that. Orlando market and south are pretty good for the most part. It's just north of Orlando that's just not where it should be. It's just crazy that the Jacksonville market isn't getting much love. Jacksonville is Florida's largest city...land per square mile and population wise.

Wait. Ok. I agree that Jacksonville should have better coverage. But you are ignoring one exceedingly important fact. The Jacksonville metro area is far smaller than the Miami or Tampa metro areas. And substantially smaller than Orlando's. City proper population and metro population are two wildly divergent figures. For example, the population of Louisville is nearing 800,000. The pipuyof Atlanta is nearing 500,000. However, the Louisville metro population is around 1.2 million while Atlanta's is nearing 6 million. Who's more important in your financial (ROI) book? Yeah, Jax is definitely far behind Miami and Tampa and a bit behind Orlando in that regard. Metro areas. Not the city proper alone.

Sadly, no.  The earlier suggestion that all of us are above average intelligence was the impetus for the riff on the Garrison Keillor quote.  Truth be told, some of our S4GRU children ride the shortbus to school.

 

AJ

Reading many of these posts in this 1000+ page long thread makes my eyes cross. And that isn't (solely) due to lack of brevity on the authors' part. *Sigh

No.  But all of our women are strong, and all of our men are good looking.

 

AJ

That pretty much sums up Atlanta proper.... In more ways than one.

Please also make an effort to type oEut proper sentences.

Jesus Christ. Yes. This. I have seen some of the most egregious instances of horrific grammar on this site. And here I thought one of the common threads we all shared was above average intelligence.

The only thing worth any hype would be the announcement of a plan to begin installing band 41 equipment on the vast majority of sites still lacking it. But that is most definitely not what we'll be hearing.

More stuff to invade your privacy in new and innovative ways.

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Correct

I detect sodium chloride. On a side note, I've been in Lexington and Louisville all week. Louisville has awesome band 41 coverage in the city with fantastic speeds averaging over 40 Mbps (DL) while Lexington still struggles with no band 41 but widespread band 25 second carrier. Speeds here in Cat country are much slower but still quite usable, averaging 5-8 Mbps.

Plans have most definitely changed.

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To what? I was hoping the "surgical" thing was just temporary and that they still were planning to put 2.5 on most every site, medium term. At this point from where we began, I would call this medium or even long term. I guess my hopes have been sufficiently dashed.

Will do! Any sort of logging I should do using SCP? I was going to ask the folks over at the ShenTelos Tracking thread in the Premier Section if they would like me to log my drive there. 

The best thing about Lewisburg, West Virginia (and there are likely few good things) is that it's only 60 miles from Snowshoe via U.S. 219.  God, I love that place.  Snowshoe would be amazing right about now.

 

Of course Snowshoe is too close to the Green Bank Radio Telescope Observatory and is, hence, in an RF National "quiet zone."  Hello Wifi calling!

You can apologize for Sprint all you want, but even you know they still have a lot of work to do. And Sprint lowering their spending is not good, especially in a wireless industry that moves so fast and is aggressive at touting peak speeds. Just look at Open Signal's latest results.

Sprint should definitely be spending more in order to catch up. Their overall native footprint is also falling behind as T-Mobile grows. You can argue that growing the network into new markets is a waste of money, but this is an industry based on perception and T-Mobile is winning it big.

I read that report earlier today and was surprised and disappointed to learn of Sprint's (non) performance. Granted, 7 Mbps is entirely usable but with Sprint's massive spectrum holdings and deployment I'd love to see them performing at least at parity with the other guys (maybe not in terms of coverage/ Percent availability but at least in terms of speed).

I wonder if Sprint really is this far behind or if something in their testing methodology could account for this..For example, the proportion of Open Signal users on each network or some other variable. Thoughts?

There are a few reasons I chose the eight different segments, rather than fewer. Personally, I agree less is better, though I was thinking about this in the more reslistic sense where people generally want more choice. I'd rather limit it to three, between 15, 30, and 45 mbps, similar to how Uverse-style pricing. Although, by doing this I needed to compact the speed rating that would fit best with price, etc.

I believe this style of pricing eventually will happen, and it'll be interesting what the carriers come up with specifically in regards to the final outcome of these plans. However, when 5g gets going, I'm hoping and expecting speed csp rating won't need to be so low and as close range as I proposed, which again I did this as the best configuration with what I know currently exists with Cricket.

Arysyn,

 

This is likely beating a dead horse but pleeaase stop writing such useless, verbally wandering posts. They are beyond highly obnoxious...Bordering on pointless. I can't tolerate reading this ish any longer. Learn to condense your flipping thoughts! Please!

Yeah, and hypothetically, monkeys might fly out of my butt.

 

AJ

Or the Falcons might have really won the Superbowl last night.

 

ALTERNATIVE FACTS

#faradaycage