rmorrisonva

Got solid B25 and B26 from Route 33 near Montebello to west of where the Route 33 bypass meets the Standardsville business Route 33

I ran periodic speed tests (about say 6-8 total) the other day while going down 267 west from Route 7 all the way to the Greenway toll booths... lowest DL was 8Mbps, the average was north of 30Mbps, the highest was just over 50Mbps... UL speeds and pings were decent too. I stayed on Sprint B41 the entire time as well... WOW, I'm quite impressed (especially given the less than perfect weather, and heavy traffic that day!)

The other half of my Everything plan (who lives in Charlottesville) tells me he's had weird text delayed-delivery and calling issues (like others have mentioned above) the past couple of days... I smell something in the air, and it's not just the spring flowers!

*ouch*

 

(one of the tree-hugging leftists)

 

;-)

 

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk 4.9.5 Yep, I downgraded! :-D

Don't get me wrong -- I love my trees and forests (I'll take somewhere on the Appalachian Trail over the city any day), I just find that some of the more strident anti-growth folks tend to have misplaced priorities (Meadowcreek Parkway is a good example, especially when the waste water plant down on Moore's Creek continues to dump fecal coliform-laden sewage almost directly in the Rivanna... that's part of the reason it smells like crap over near Pantop's)...

My general take is this: "hurry up and wait" is a good philosophy for a lot of things (better roads, cars get A-to-B faster, less emissions), build infrastructure (weather cell towers, bridges, roads, etc.) ahead of time and it tends to be cheaper, more efficient, and better utilized over the long-haul.

*Get's down off soapbox*

Now if nTelos could have just hurried up and waited with this permitting, arghh!

One can hope right?

You'd be surprised (Charlottesville born and raised, so I completely know what you mean about the huggers... look how long it took for the City to open their half of the 50-years-in-the-making Meadowcreek er.. John Warner Parkway)... but the Albemarle "sign nazis" are well known for being the nastiest of the nasty NIMBYers.

Well a little bit of news... a well placed source tells me that nTelos is in preliminary talks with the Albemarle County (basically the Charlottesville area) zoning folks about tower upgrades. Apparently, in addition to highly regulated signage ordinances and "viewsheds", the county makes it an arduous process to essentially do any physical work to a cell site w/o an extensive review/approval process. If nTelos were to apply for permitting TODAY, it would likely take 9-12 months to be approved. Why they are just now entering preliminary talks, I have no idea (but this is crapTelos we're talking about after all).

That said, I don't know how this would impact upgrades to the cabinets and non-Antenna type equipment but I'm told that might even fall under the purview of the zoning review process, I guess only time will tell.

Not sure how the process might differ for site in Charlottesville City proper, so could be a silver lining there.

Shentel gave me my first taste of what fully-deployed (or close) NV 1.0 would be like way before my native DC market was anywhere close to completion (and in some parts it's still not).

I am confident Shentel won't let all of their hard work go down the tubes as traffic increases.

I <3 Shentel (and H8 nTelos for that matter)!

I lost LTE and 3G connectivity last week for about 2 hours (roughly 6PM to 8PM) and I was in several places over that period (Tysons, Springfield, and Ashburn). I figured they must be doing something market-wide.

They will probably need to shut individual towers down as they upgrade. Service will degrade some when they do that. When Shentel was replacing equipment here, calls dropped quite often. Once the work is done though, it'll be worth it.

 

Sent from my Note 4.

I noticed the same in Shentel-territory early on.

Likewise, I noticed some dropping back to 1X around Charlottesville recently as others have described elsewhere in nTelos-land.

Any word on when sprint will get turned on

It's been said over and over, nobody knows.

Please stop spamming the thread.

First of all i am not venting ... secondly i have posted improvements i have noticed.. and last please stop attacking my posts... i am simply stating my opinion

I'm not attacking you, just pointing out that some of your posts (opinion or not) are not related to network upgrades (ie. "they better have LTE by end of my contract etc etc.). Maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's my opinion.

I get tired of waiting... i have had them 6 years at the end of this contract and am hopeing they get lte by then

That's great, I've had them for 11 years. If you are tired of waiting I'd switch, otherwise better just to post about improvements/developments one has noticed in nTelos-land. I get excited everything I see life on the thread only to open it and see people complaining about the state of LTE in nTelos-land or Sprint in general. I assure you we all feel the same way but this really isn't the place to be venting.

I spoke with a rep this morning and they gave me the same line "this is a large upgrade... we can't give a specific timeline... blah blah blah".  When I talked to a tech in July 2014 he said that work was supposed to start in August and be finished by late September.  smh

Reps are pretty much useless, I wouldn't waste my time asking them anything (let alone sharing it since, again, most of them are full of you-know-what).

If you're in nTelos-land and have Sprint you have options:

1. You can stick with the better overall coverage footprint and low prices Sprint offers (despite the LTE caveats).

2. You can switch to T-Mobile or a T-Mo MVNO and get some LTE coverage but a much smaller overall coverage footprint for similar prices as you pay with Sprint.

3. You can cough up more dough for service with one of the Duopoly and get LTE coverage and a good coverage footprint, albeit for a lot more $$.

Not to be too terse but I hate that about half the time I check on this thread to see if nTelos has made any progress I am instead confronted with a bunch of complaining and self-pity.

C'mon guys!

Pretty consistently around 6-8 up and down during peak times. Usable, but much slower than it had been. I was consistently getting 14-23 down as of about 4-6 months ago.

 

Sent from my Note 4.

Without B41  being deployed 6-8MBit/s on-peak is pretty damned good, and PERFECTLY usable for just about anything you (should) be using your phone for. I don;t see what the issue is here, I have no complaints when it comes to My service in the Shentel are (Western/Northern Virginia).

Considering the sector maximum for anything non-B41 is about 37Mbit/s, 14-25Mbit/s is an unrealistically high performance expectation unless nobody else is using data in the sector. Frankly, it's good to see things slow down a bit as it shows there is a decent Sprint user base in the area (in other words they aren't likely to neglect you, although Shentel tends to be extremely responsive anyways).

I think folks in this thread are starting to get their expectations out of whack.

Also some up towards Lexington, VA. Close to (just southwest) of where I first spotted that B26 on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Looks like nTelos is FINALLY throwing the switch in a couple of places.

I've told my friends in Charlottesville that right now I cannot in good faith recommend Sprint since they are the only top 4 carrier lacking LTE there. That said, T-Mobile's LTE is spotty and I find that in general I get a better more consistent experience on Sprint even over nTelos EV-DO (usually 1Mbps down give or take .5Mbps) than over T-Mobile LTE/HSPA+.

Fingers crossed that this is a harbinger of a wider LTE rollout in nTelos-land!

The Shentel site in Grottoes is 15-20 miles away probably.  It is not totally unreasonable to assume you connected to the Shentel Grottoes site.  You were up high in a probable low noise area.  What little signal you had did not have any competition from any other signals.

At 15-20 miles, the signal is going to be extremely weak, hence you dropped to nTelos1X occasionally. I suspect that you probably could not actually use the Band 26 connection and if you tried, it probably would have crashed.

I've seen 1x800 punch through 15-20 miles into nTelos territory, with line-of-sight (i.e. no hills between) but if B26 is able to manage the same, color me impressed.

That said, the connection was totally usable (much more so than the nTelos 1xRTT PCS signal was).

Also keep in mind that nTelos is headquartered in Waynesboro so their coverage is generally OKish in the area.

Lastly, I've had terrific results with Shentel B26 in Shenendoah Natl Park which is covered by Shentel from the west... basically as durable (and sometimes more durable) than my EVDO PCS signals ever have been up there.

Also, you will find my signal reported at Humpback Rocks on Sensorly.

FYI, I was hiking Humpback Rocks (in Blue Ridge, south of Waynesboro, southeast of Stuart's Draft, and southwest of Charlottesville (nTelos territory). I had Sprint B26 LTE near around the summit and on the western side of the mountain. The times that the LTE dropped the phone would revert to nTelos 1xRTT. I'm not sure if the LTE signal was also originating from an nTelos site or from a Shentel site such as the one in Grottoes, north of Waynesboro, although IMHO Band 26 seems to really propagate well in the mountains.

B26 LTE is a boon the west side of the Blue Ridge. And avid hiker, I've noticed it a lot in the wayward hollers in Shenandoah NP. I even had 4G while camping in the backcountry! Nothing like Netflix after a long hike. FWIW my Nexus 7 (2013) on T-Mob (marginal EDGE signal) and ATT GoPhone (no signal) failed me.

Question to all, particularly those on the new 4.4.3 modem:

1. Have you modified your band priority? If so what settings are you using?

2. If not, what are yours defaulted to currently?

I've got B41 and B26 set to enabled, and band priority as follows B41-1, B26-0, B25-0. It seems to allow me to pick up B41 (which is rather pervasive ion my area) much easier when it's available, but I'm not 100% convinced the settings even do anything. Thoughts? Network guys?

You all should be loving this part. It means that Sprint has been threatening ntelos with over building them for a while. If they don't finish rolling out to sprints expectations then you can all expect Shentel to come rolling in. That should be a huge motivator to ntelos to deploy quickly and efficiently.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5

(nTelos)  <-(Sprint)

Start keeping your eyes on sensorlys sprint 4g coverage in areas like Beckley and waynesboro to see if anything starts popping up.

 

Sent from my EVO using Tapatalk

I'll be in Charlottesville, not sure if they are deployed there yet but I know there was talk of it. Then again, Waynesboro is just (a very scenic) drive over the Blue Ridge, heck if I end up hiking this weekend in the south half of the south section of Shenandoah Nat'l Park on the west side of the ridge I can see what sort of nTelos goodness is being blasted!

This is good news. Now it's all about when are they going to open up Sprint LTE customers on their existing network. Sprint Band 25 devices will work on all nTelos Band 2 LTE sites. Band 25 is all PCS including G block. Band 2 is all PCS, except G block. So every Band 25 device can run on any PCS spectrum (minus H block, which is not out there yet).

 

Robert via Samsung Note 8.0 using Tapatalk Pro

That is terrific news! Thanks for setting me straight on that!

That's a lot of bands.... One can dream.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

Could you imagine it with carrier aggregation? Hahah