aliensporebomb

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.

I suspect some of these towers are going through sporadic testing. For example, the Eden Prairie/Chanhassen towers I was able to get into for the first week or so of operation then suddenly not. But I've always been able to connect to the 394/100 towers in St. Louis Park. The Bloomington 494 strip towers near 34th avenue shows gradually spreading sensorly contacts but I've never been able to connect. Until this stuff goes "officially live" it's going to be agony and ecstasy I guess. That's the nature of a big technology rollout in the coldest part of the country during the coldest time of the year.

I suspect this is only going to get fixed when Network Vision is complete and that will be a while. I'm doing pretty well but my local Sprint Tower I can see out my back office window.

Last time I post anything with some CPU hogging app in the background. Gads. "Siki: the voice integration that makes you sick!"

http://www.macrumors.com/2013/01/28/apple-releases-ios-6-1-with-new-lte-carriers-and-fandango-siri-integration/

Ran into some interesting speedtests driving west from Highway 100 and 394 in St. Louis Park to 169 and points northwards. I noticed during one of the tests it changed the test server from Minnetonka MN to Detroit MI and back. Odd. A little later: Farther north but nearing the edge of LTE in that part of town - still getting respectable speed even at -118 dbm:

I saw this and wanted to chime in on something I ran into last weekend that kind of surprised me. We ate at a place called the Convention Grill in Edina (great burger place that's been around since the 1930s). But it has the worst Sprint reception of any place I frequent and rarely use my phone there. But, I took my iPhone case off and all of a sudden my reception was noticeably better and I could actually use the phone. I went from -112dbm to -116dbm to -80-ish which wasn't great but it was better. The case I have is a Ventev which is made out of a kind of moulded silicone rubber that I like for its protective capability. I'm aware cases can attenuate signal but I was shocked at how much it was attenuating the signal. It possibly is also coloring my experience with LTE and non-LTE signals as well. I'm going to head to a place where I was unable to get LTE later today where I know LTE signals have been seen on Sensorly. Might be interesting to see "case on" and "case off" differences.

There's some sensorly blips surrounding the airport - I suspect one is coming from on top of the VA medical center, there's another right in the airport near the Glumack Drive terminal and another south at 34th and 494 which I was unable to get on my own phone but it appeared the tower was on Delta Airlines property behind as security so I couldn't see if they'd done a network vision upgrade on it. And then another blip to the northwest side of the airport near a park. I'm hoping the south metro gets some LTE love soon but being that this is an unlaunched market we might see it come in later. I never imagined Rochester would get widespread LTE before Bloomington but sometimes they're up against city permits being stalled, equipment needed, bad weather and the availability of everyone to get the job done.

Yeah, you should be getting LTE for sure - Rochester is more purple than where I live in the Twin Cities!

I've noticed too for instance the Eagan tower that went live a couple weeks ago - I drove past that area for work and got a LTE signal at -125 dbm (I was a ways away from the tower heading towards 494 to head east) and lost the tower at one point. But then as I was crossing the bridge to head from Eagan back to Bloomington I briefly got an LTE signal again and I suspect it's signal bleed coming from that Eagan tower across the long flat expanse of Long Meadow Lake allowing that due to no obstructions. And it's thursday again - keep close watch on sensorly and your phone because it seems since the first towers went live November 25th all the new sites go active on thursday evenings.

Yes, I was totally kidding! They get high school kids or whoever they can get and they're not radio/technology geeks usually. A lot of it is a game of telephone with "Oh, my regional manager heard from the guy who services one of the tower guys washing machine...." I also had a guy tell me in one of the Sprint stores with a straight face that the entire network vision rollout would be done by March in Minnesota and I'm thinking "I know exactly how many sites have been put in place and there's no WAY they'll be done by then unless they're superhuman." Late spring/early summer maybe?

Or: it might LOOK like they're finished but does the layman really know what a completed tower looks like? Thinking: I'd classify the average cell phone store employee as being in that category. The cabinet might be on the ground but are the cables connected? have the RRUs and antenna array been properly installed and positioned? What about the microwave backhaul? And even if everything is 100% installed so far as the hardware, remember these things need to be provisioned and antennas aimed and configured and there's a good deal of physical work by a bunch of different people that involves getting even a single cell site up and going. And once the thing is in place it needs to be approved by Sprint because these things are being installed by contractors so...... You see what I mean?

I saw a guy walking thru my backyard a week ago with an android phone sensorly mapping my area. He said he wanted to be thorough.

Probably soon - there's LTE all around you - in St. Paul to the South, 494 in Maplewood to the east, Downtown Minneapolis and St. Louis Park/Golden Valley to the west, and White Bear Lake/Hugo to the north. They'll fill it in sooner or later. And regarding the next iPhone - Apple is notoriously tight lipped about ANY of their new devices but you might look at http://www.macrumors.com/ for the next few months. I own an iPhone5 and it works great on LTE. But I live in Bloomingrton so no LTE fun just yet, it's when I visit offices I work at that I get to get the LTE.

I'm seeing isolated spots of LTE in Shakopee - it may be "skip" coming from up the hill in Eden Prairie but someone has tracked LTE in Shakopee on Sensorly.

Not to mention that when I started looking into this the first sites for LTE on Sprint showed in in Eden Prairie in November 25th. We are not even two months into the process and this map should show you a pretty good representation of all the LTE in this area: http://www.sensorly.com/map/4G/US/USA/Sprint/lte_310sprint#q=Minneapolis%20St.%20Paul The Purple is where LTE is presently but more and more shows up all of the time.

I was in the St. Louis Park/Golden Valley area today and got some speedtest screenshots to show what you can expect: This is what I got when I first entered the area. Not bad at all. These were from taking speedtests running down the frontage road heading west near Xenia/Park Place along 394 - I was taking a screenshot about every two minutes. Best download speed here - best upload speed seemed to peak around 9 megabit but not here. I had to head back to 3G land shortly after taking this one. I figured out the signal closest to where the Canadian Pacific Railroad crosses 394 was coming from this tower near the defunct Eliot Park auto service: I have pics of the cabinets on the ground in a little fenced in area if anyone is interested.

Right up by the West End shops and theater is where it seemed to turn on literally right after I saw a movie up there with the wife about a week ago. It was strange but we were soon away from that area. 100 and 394 area.

The best speed I've gotten out of Eden Prairie/Chanhassen area: I will have to revisit methinks.

Since it's a real estate firm and since real estate agents are independent contractors they buy what they want - it's all across the board. We've got blackberry enterprise server for those who are still using those devices but the vast majority are iphone/ipad or android smartphones and tablets. I think the very last Treo running Goodlink shut down earlier last year - the migration was fast and furious. Most of the agents who have computers or iphones also have ipads which may or may not have cellular service and/or equivalent android phones and tablets. A lot of HTC product such as the EVO - it will be interesting to see where this goes after those users two year contracts are up. I'm not seeing a lot of Samsung Galaxy Note or SIII believe it or not. Windows phones are still in the minority. In our case the minority at this time is android since our current email server architecture works well enough with android but we found two instances (software bugs) relating to exchange activesync where if certain conditions existed (either low memory on the phone or their mailbox close to established limits) they just wouldn't get email anymore no matter what you did which had a lot of people up in arms since to fix it you basically had to completely wipe the phone and nobody wants to do that. Our email server is changing soon so things could change. A lot of it is "what things can we do that will get us customers and buyers" - that iPad3/4 retina display does a good job showing photos of properties if it's a prospect who is relocating due to a job: "we'll fly out there and see it in person now." They have a presentation template for a certain app they use. There's a few old timers still on non smart-phones but even the old guys have some kind of smartphone now. Which presents a whole new range of problems of course.

Sadly I have enough exposure to Android thru my workplace and have determined that something about the touch interface is incompatible with my skin. I can hardly type on them - it's like the chemistry in my skin/oil makeup doesn't allow me to type like a normal human. If I type "hi there" on an droid phone it comes out russian like "ceeakaeeopeeectate" or the like. It's bizarre. iPhone, no problemo.

Done - we'll see if the Apple censor machine removes my comment. I tried to be fair and balanced.

Obviously though Apple can tell if it's "o", "3G" or "LTE" as they are notifying the user that this has changed by that top status line on the device. So they're using unpublished APIs no doubt. There are other ways though: Maybe it could go by speed of connection? You wouldn't expect to see a 30 megabit 3G signal but would assume that was LTE. Maybe on T-Mobile but not Sprint. Anecdotally I've seen up to 6 megabit 3G signals on the old AT&T network last year but since moving to Sprint I have not yet seen a 3G signal any higher than 2.8 megabit. Maybe 2.93 was the very highest. So perhaps to be safe assume that the speed of 1-3 megabits is 3G, and above presume LTE. To nail it down If there are ways to determine the hardware state of the radio (can this be done?) to see if the LTE portions are running? Another thought - is there any way to change a software state based on what is being displayed on the screen? "If the pixels are filled at this location on the screen we know the device is running an LTE connection"? Not as accurate as having a simple "If Radio State = LTE then...." but it's a way of making it go perhaps.

There's a Sprint tower right behind our local Wendy's come to think of it. Is that by design or accident? Okay, I really wish I could do more with the Sensorly install I have on my iPhone5. I'd love to be able to do the trip plot maneuver that the Droid phones can. In fact, I actually considered moving to droid just because of Sensorly but as a smartphone admin for a Fortune 100 type business I find that every time I try to type or use an android device my fingers refuse. It's sad. I can't type on them or control them to save my life. Full Sensorly on the iPhone but I imagine Apple is like "why would you want an app to do that?" Well, for this reason.