imekul

People have talked about the Spark speeds here and the LG Nexus 5s picking up on them.  Is that the same thing as the 800 MHz coverage, or is that a totally different animal?  I understand the 800 MHz is supposed to dramatically improve coverage and signal penetration.

Also, are all St. Louis-area towers set for Spark/800 MHz?  If so, is there any timeline on that?

I've bought many of these guys and loaded DD-WRT on them.  They have been very stable, and the range is better than my old Linksys WRT54g routers.

Not sure how the range compares with the $100 routers, but for 20 bucks, I think this is a steal.

If I have the three-digit serving cell from my GS3's LTE Engineering screen, can I tell which tower I'm connected to by looking at the map? 

For instance, I was connected to what has to be the South Belt West/Frank Scott Parkway tower in Belleville.  When I was a block away, my LTE Engineering screen showed a serving cell of 424, band of 25, and RSRP of -80.  

In this case it seems fairly obvious that I was connected to this tower.  But in cases where I have a weak LTE signal or I'm not sure where it's coming from, how can I take the info from the LTE Engineering screen and figure out which tower I'm on?

Is there any way to find out what tower I'm connected to on an AOSP Galaxy S3?  Or a stock/TouchWiz GS3, for that matter?

Full bars? I hope you're aware of the correct way to view your LTE signal. 

Hmm... maybe I'm not.  What is the best way?  An app, such as Signal Check?

The Swansea site must be live now.  I drove through that area and had full bars of 4G.  Don't think my AOSP Galaxy S3 will show the SCIDs, though...

Hey, is there any map that shows all of the Sprint towers (both upgraded and not) in a certain area?  network.sprint.com seems to show some info, but I'm pretty sure it's not showing every tower location.

Has anyone else had strange issues this week? I just had the second instance of calling someone I know and someone else answers. I called my boss yesterday and someone named Chip answered. I called my wife today and some guy answered. And no my wife was not with some guy. Really weird.

I had that happen a few years back.  Couldn't figure out a rhyme or reason to it, as far as being attributable to any specific tower/phone/number.  Was very strange.

Noticing a purple spot at the O'Fallon Family Sports Park just a little east of I-64 and 159.

Looks like the center fielder was playing pretty deep.

Mapped some LTE on Route 3 in Waterloo.

Had solid LTE at Horner Park in Lebanon, Illinois today.

Some have microwave backhaul(through a "dish") most have fiber run though. As some on here will tell you there are some sites where you can't even see evidence of digging that have it completed. This to me looks like cabinet parts and maybe RRU's from the model numbers. Good find. I added your post to the In Progress thread on the sponsor side. This is the first site in St. Clair Co. to be marked in progress! I'm assuming you are in the St. Clair Co. Area? Have you checked any other sites?

Haven't checked any other sites in the area yet.

They were hoisting up equipment today at the site.  Do you know how long it takes for them to fire things up once they have the equipment in place?  Just a matter of days or weeks, maybe?

I couldn't see any evidence of recently-disturbed ground, though.  Do they run fiber to every single site, I guess?

There's activity on a site off of Mueller Road and Forest Hill School Road outside of Millstadt.  

Awesome. And if I average a 3G signal of -95 now, were you saying you would expect that to possibly improve a little bit with the upgrades? Possibly a bump of 1-5 dBm?

This is interesting stuff!

Very good info, guys. Thanks!

@nahum365 -- Do you know what a consistent 3G signal of something like -95 would translate into in terms of LTE speeds? Obviously those speeds can fluctuate, but at what point would a stronger signal (-90, -85, etc) be good enough to get all that LTE would offer?

I'm in the St. Louis area, where Sprint will hopefully get LTE someday. My house has a low 3G signal (one to two bars normally, and sometimes no signal in the basement) with decent 3G speed (just got 548k down, 509 up).

So I have three questions:

1 - Assuming I'm within Sprint's LTE footprint, does my current 3G signal tell me what kind of 4G signal I'll have? If I have a low 3G signal, does that necessarily mean my LTE signal will be low?

2 - As a follow-up, what IS the typical range of both a 3G and LTE site? Is one significantly better/farther than the other?

3 - Finally... from my research, it looks like generally, Sprint's LTE footprint is larger than its WiMAX footprint. Is that generally the case? Is Sprint's LTE coverage area likely to be greater than its WiMAX? I sure hope so, as I live just a few miles outside of their WiMAX zone. :-)

Thank you!

So I guess the number of sites in a given area can vary greatly based on how dense the area is?

Say there are 10,000 people at a ballgame in Atlanta or some big city... how much bandwidth would they be sharing, assuming they're all Sprint customers with LTE phones?

Better yet, any estimate on what kind of bandwidth OVERALL would be available in a given market? Are we talking just hundreds of megabits per second, gigabits, or just how high does it get if it's covering 50 or 100 square miles (or however large the market is)?

This stuff just interests me, and I'm wondering what the breakdown is of total bandwidth available to an entire market and then also broken down into smaller, denser areas.

Great info, guys. Thanks for sharing! Interesting stuff.

Oh, just curiosity. If one tower covers an entire neighborhood or something, I'm wondering how much bandwidth all the users are sharing.

For that matter, do you happen to know the capacity of a 3G tower?

Thanks for the info!

Most sites have three sectors. In Sprint's initial LTE deployment, each sector has a peak data capacity of effectively 37 Mbps, but average data capacity is likely closer to 20 Mbps. So, for you to download a large file and average 20 Mbps, you would probably have to be one of very few users on that sector at that time.

 

AJ

This is something I've wondered for a while now...

How much bandwidth does a single LTE site/tower have? Say I'm in Atlanta and downloading a large file at 20 Mbps. How many people like me would it take to max out the bandwidth at that location at a given time?

Also, I want to make sure my understanding is correct about how LTE connections work. Say a tower gives off 100 Mbps. If I am the only one connected to it, I obviously won't get the full 100 Mbps, but perhaps would get 20-ish or whatever the maximum number that Sprint usually allows. If it's 20, then I imagine four other people connecting at the same time would all get 20 as well, and then if the total number of users jumped to 10, we would all get slower speeds (approximately 10 Mbps) to share the available bandwidth. With 20 users, we would each get approximately 5 Mbps. Is this generally correct?

By the way, I realize that it's not a real-world example, but when I say "users," I'm meaning people who are essentially maxing out their connection -- all doing speed tests, large file downloads, etc. People with a sustained large transfer.