aliensporebomb

I've seen some towers be live with LTE for an extended period then shut down - apparently because we are in a pre-launch state in terms of the market.

At first Eden Prairie/Chanhassen was THE place we could guarantee a connection but at a Christmas Party in mid december at a friends in EP where I'd normally get it it just wasn't happening and I suspected they shut it down again.

Speaking of that, I'm going to check out the Burnsville LTE sometime this weekend again. I want to see if it's still running LTE or not.

That's true but I wasn't going to say anything in the non-sponsor area about it!

From what I can see (unless I haven't been paying attention) we have new LTE from Eau Claire almost all the way to Rice Lake Wisconsin (the Northeast Side, really starting in or near Chippewa Falls proper) and then also between Stanley and Thorp, Wisconsin.

And LaCrosse LTE extends west nearly to Sparta. Looks like there's some LTE north of Tomah, WI a bit too.

I've been focusing on Minnesota more than Wisconsin so this may have been active.

Not sure if there's any new Minnesota LTE but I haven't really done a lot of searching.

Any reports of new sites online? I've checked Sensorly but it's early yet. I usually don't see anything new until late in the afternoon.

My friend has a Galaxy SIII and since he bought it it's been doing very strange things - at points where people all around him have excellent reception his phone will drop to zero bars and stop communicating. His phone has also done very odd things like spontaneously rebooting itself and/or just shutting down with pretty decent battery (above 60%).

The weird thing is the "zero bars within visual distance of a nearby Sprint tower while others get full signal reception."

I was walking right next to him in a store where I was getting around -59 dBm reception on my Sprint phone and his phone was showing zero bars but about 75% battery.

I took a look at his settings and it seemed normal enough - there were no firmware upgrades to be had and it seemed normal enough except for the odd behavior. He hasn't dropped it - it still looks new and he only got it in October.

Well, he took the thing to our local Sprint service center and when the tech saw it he kind of got a little disgusted look and took it in the back room and apparently totally wiped the phone and pushed the latest firmware on it and restored all his data.

Now it's been working pretty well. Has anyone seen this with the SIII phone behaving erratically or just a particular firmware revision be fairly erratic?

ott3r - thanks for the mapping. I did notice that on my own phone I was able to head east almost all the way to Apple Valley and STILL got some LTE. But I was driving west thru Burnsville and could have sworn I saw some work being done on another Sprint site. I'll see if I can get photos..

I think the biggest problem is that technology is moving faster than ever - the whole industry standardized on LTE instead of Wimax or other methods and then we have new phones coming out every business quarter more amazing than the last but the phone companies still want you to sign up for two years.

The other thought is that LTE is online off 94 in Lakeland/Hudson. So Stillwater is not that far away. LTE progress seems slow as this winter has been challenging. But spring is coming.

ZZ - that Burnsville tower at 35E and 35W started up thursday and I was by there again today and LTE going strong again - 30+ megabit down and around 10 megabit up. It looks like they're coming up 35W and soon they will be in my neighborhood.

That's a question I've always wanted to ask: if its a tower being shared by multiple carriers when workmen are up on the tower I could see the Sprint stuff being offline while work is conducted but what about other carriers?

LTE live in Burnsville Minnesota - excellent speeds (31+ megabit down + 7 megabit up).

Right at the spot where 35W and 35E converge.

Ya mean 35E and W?

See my edit. Yes.

LTE live in Burnsville! Right at 35E/35W!!!! See Sensorly!

Further update: drove around the 35E/35W area and was getting very good speeds/signal strength.

Maxed out at 31 mbps down and 9.53 Mbps up. Excellent.

That means LTE is all around me - now it just has to fill in!

Interesting. I've NEVER gotten a dropped call on Sprint and I can't count the number of times I got dropped calls on AT&T.

That being said, if you're in Rochester there's LTE all over that town now (moreso than my own town) so you should be good to go.

Speaking of LTE - thursdays in Minnesota is when I usually see new sites come on (it was the first day of LTE back in November too). Worth keeping an eye out for.

Yep - then there will be more LTE goodness for then rest of us. Stuff is in the works!

Honestly I would have mapped the entire south metro right now had my device been capable of it.

If I could get a Galaxy SIII cheap and some kind of sprint sIm to use with it without accruing additional cellular charges I'd do it.

I did get a signal near the airport the day before yesterday but MophoManners believes it was slop coming from Highland Park in St. Paul and I believe he is correct because it wasn't anything I could stay connected to for very long.

However, lack of current LTE in the south metro doesn't mean that there isn't LTE being prepared in the south. There have been sightings of equipment necessary for LTE at south metro sites and/or seemingly sites "ready to go" but no LTE. Yet.

Who's imma?

I think she was a friend of my grandmother's friend, Erma.

I've had my suspicions about several suburbs in the south metro actually.

That's what I think a lot of folks don't understand: it doesn't have to do with population density, or that a famous person lives there, or that some Sprint exec has a house there or that the super bowl might be happening nearby: instead, it has to do with mundane stuff like "did the permit go thru with the city?" (they can't just make big changes to the tower if they want) "did the equipment get delivered?" (kind of hard to go LTE without the equipment) "were we able to reserve the big crane on wednesday?" (need to get to the tower) and "is the weather safe enough to do this?" (kinda hard to do it when it's well below zero) and not to mention that "is the crew available on xyz day?" Stuff like that.

If you look here:

http://www.sensorly.com/map/4G/US/USA/Sprint/lte_310sprint

Punch in your city or zip code and you can see where the LTE is - it just started in very late November so we're still in the early stages yet.

Some interesting developments tonight: over near my in-laws where speeds have historically been sub 1 megabit in the past I saw this all night at various times:

Speeds around 2 megabit down - very usable. Peak download speed was 2.30 megabit and 1.0 up.

Notice this locale is near where a large LTE rollout has occured - I wonder if this is a sign of more to come?

In my own case I just put images up on my server and point to it.

Remember the last week was mostly below zero so work did slow for sure but it will pick up again as the weather becomes less frigid. We'll see today. If you look at Sensorly's maps there's a new indication of LTE coming out of Northfield (well, south of the south end of it) to the north almost all the way to Famington (264th Street West).

I thought the difference between rootmetrics and sensorly is that rootmetrics gives less overall data than sensorly in some respects: it just tells you where the signal is whereas sensorly can tell the difference between 2G/3G/4G.

That's where Sensorly has the edge.