mattnew

Bummer. How's the 3G service in and around Boston? Usable at all?

So far I've been getting 1-2 MB/s on 3G service, between 6 and 14mb/s on 4g depending on area. From what I've seen anything over 1mb/s is very useable/instantaneous for most data tasks.

Bit the bullet today and switched from Verizon to Sprint. Happy to report that Haverhill MA has LTE turned on, currently getting 5-7 mb/s on sensorly's speed test in my den.. which was notorious for not getting any service before.

Please see this thread: http://s4gru.com/ind...-massachusetts/

For more updates on the MA market.

Thanks, I've been following that thread for a while now. I only asked on the comment above b/c its specific to the town I live in. Much of this thread is South of Boston, however I'll keep following. Thanks again.

Friends are free, more or less, and often have service with different service providers...

Everybody I know around here has Verizon. But I have been asking....

I'm seeing eHRPD in Haverhill, MA, but no speed increases on my 3G or live LTE yet.

Was wondering if there was an update on this... I live in Haverhill MA and sprint is showing it lit up on their coverage maps now for LTE?

Sim cards = cheap; unlocked phone that can connect using the latest technologies off contract would be ~$500 probably on the low end, I honestly haven't checked. Thats where my "expensive" assumptions came from.

I'm an engineer, but when it comes to cell service I'm not even going to pretend I can talk intelligently on this subject. Basically its as you said.. I knew the hardware for the most part was there in some phones to act as a spectrum analyzer that would be functional in the ranges that I'd need, I was wondering what was missing or what the significant hurdle was to pulling that information out of the phones... which is the SIM card. I had suspected this was likely the case.

Thanks for the information.

And that gets expensive rather quickly... would be cheaper to pick up a prepaid from a different carrier and try it out...

while understanding why the carriers wouldn't necessarily want to do this... from an end user perspective being able to do this I'd think would be a fairly powerful tool.

Hi All, 1st time post.

I'm a verizon person, switched from sprint to verizon about 9 years ago... and I'm thinking about coming back to sprint.

I've been pouring over sites like rootmetrics and sensorly to compare the coverage in my area ( haverhill, ma , and southern NH ) and the one thing I keep coming back to is that it would be great if I could go out and see for myself what the signal strength of various networks was where I lived/worked/etc.

For example...the iphone regardless of carrier seems to have the same build, so that means sprints iphone should have GSM/HSPA+ antennas in it... is there a way to check on a sprint iphone what AT&T's signal strength in a particular area was? or verizon's signal strength? or T-mobile's?

I know zilch about cell signal encryption or if its even possible to tell from the signal which network the originator is from without one of their SIM cards, but I'm wondering if there is any information here that could be teased out without having multiple phones on you. I'm wondering if even a simple app could be written that just gives you a decibel measurement of what each antenna is receiving....