PedroDaGr8

TMobile just filed to upgrade the site they just installed last year over by Totem Lake:

https://permitsearch.mybuildingpermit.com/PermitDetails/BNR22-02836/Kirkland

I'm guessing it will add n41 because that's the only band that site lacks. 

Not western Washington per se but the wife and I went hiking at Palouse Falls and the Columbia Wildlife Refuge (namely by the Drumheller Basalt Columns). I was surprised to see 5GUC in areas like Othello and Connell. Those are far from bustling metropolises or even mid-size towns.

On the other hand, outside of those areas and there was basically zero TMo coverage on WA-24, WA-26,WA-260, and WA-261 . I spent most of my time roaming on AT&T with the occasional US Cellular or Sprint tower (hopefully keeps)

T-Mobile isn't joking about rolling out 5GUC to cover as many as possible. I was out in the middle of nowhere Washington this weekend to do some hiking in some of the interesting parts of the Columbia River Flood Basalts. I was surprised to see they had deployed n41 in a number of small rural towns like Othello (pop 7500) and Connell (pop 5500). 

15 hours ago, JDP121 said:

Don't expect too much. I did confirm with one of my sources that the third party that does the updates to the T-Mobile and Verizon Maps that they updated the map on the T-MO site to early and has yet to revert it back. I can confirm this since I traveled most of the UC area on the map with no connections whatsoever. Even went to to towers and did a network reset at each one to see if I could connect with no luck whatsoever. 

That explains a few locations on my local map.All of the inaccurate have a permit in place to upgrade the tower but it hasn't been done yet.

1 hour ago, PythonFanPA said:

Haven't seen him post here in at least over a year now don't think, but assuming he's still lurking.....HBD Robert!

He's definitely lurking. He liked one of my posts from a couple weeks ago in the Western Washington Market thread.

2 hours ago, PythonFanPA said:

Just noticed this as I hadn't tried using it since, but is the Flashlight option broken after the update for anyone else?  Hoping this is just a software issue and not hardware on my end.  I'm on the direct from Samsung unlocked version particularly here.

Just tested it and it works fine for me. I'm on the TMobile locked S22U.

On 3/22/2022 at 12:02 PM, RAvirani said:

I actually have those Commscope antennas in inventory now plus a bunch of SignalCheck drive test data in that area, so this should be pretty accurate:

https://imgur.com/a/j4959Tl

Mostly QPSK/16QAM. 

By the way, which frequency is this calculated with? I am wondering if they are optimizing some things for n41 since that is becoming their primary data channel. 

1 hour ago, RAvirani said:

Just the map canvas. It’s easier to see where mall/big box stores are on a satellite map than a roadmap (at least in my opinion). 

Ohh, map versus satellite view. I sound have noticed that. I've been in and out of meetings all day and my brain is toast.

2 hours ago, RAvirani said:

I actually have those Commscope antennas in inventory now plus a bunch of SignalCheck drive test data in that area, so this should be pretty accurate:

https://imgur.com/a/j4959Tl

Mostly QPSK/16QAM. 

What does satellite mean in this context? Also, that is pretty bad when it comes to modulation. 

T-Mobile has already pulled the Sprint equipment from the top of the Totem Lake Motel 6. We will see soon how bad things get signal-wise in that area. 

23 minutes ago, RAvirani said:

Sprint eNB 747123 has been outfitted with Sprint equipment. I hope they null the southwest sector on eNB 84598/97496…

I assume you mean Tmo equient and yeah I hope they do. That being said, I have little faith based on the Totem Lake area.

2 hours ago, jreuschl said:

Update just arrived! 

Got it here too!

5 hours ago, Paynefanbro said:

Two more Manhattan keep sites: 

eNB 9097/9098/9099 (Location: 40.73731141530291, -74.00194364096748)

eNB 9670/9671/9672 (Location: 40.72189329735279, -74.00495597394665)

Have to say, T-Mobile has been keeping A LOT more sites than I expected. 

21 hours ago, mdob07 said:

I'm surprised we still haven't seen the February update. Neither of my phones have received anything since I set them up initially. 

It is REALLY REALLY strange. Makes me wonder if there is some sort of show-stopper bug (much like what impacted the Pixels). 

For those who monitor permits, I just noticed that permits for Unicorporated King County (Starting second half of 2020) are now on MyBu8ldingPermit. 

3 hours ago, dkyeager said:

Hopefully once they are done with the marketing check boxes, they will go for more density, not only with n41 but also with n71.

If my region is any indication, they will. I can only think of a handful of towers near me which haven't been upgraded yet. Most are either in weird locations (like a basin), already covered by another tower, or in a NIMBY area. 

Hopefully it doesn't have anything to do with the recent Samsung Hack

22 hours ago, Paynefanbro said:

Not sure honestly. We've been wondering the same thing here in NYC for a while. Our setup is a bit different than other parts of the U.S. but sometimes T-Mobile leaves one of those APX16's behind post-upgrade and other times they remove it completely

On Sprint to T-Mobile conversions here, it's a toss up. Sometimes they don't add a mid-band only antenna at all and other times they'll add an AIR32 or an AIR3246.

Per Rey:

Quote

From glancing at the spec sheets it looks like the Commscope antenna has a clear leg up over the RFS antenna when it comes to polarization diversity. The cross polarization ratios at boresight are both roughly 18 dB, but the Commscope antenna is 14ish dB over the entire sector while the RFS antenna is closer to 8 dB (keep in mind the dB scale is logarithmic so +6 dB is four times the performance).

This means UEs connected to midband on the RFS antenna will lose transmit diversity very quickly as they move away from the center of the sector; the Commscope antenna will perform much better under these circumstances. If this is an area with a lot of buildings (i.e. diversity loss due to clutter/shadowing is a concern), sacrificing a small bit of gain for much better XPOL is definitely worth it.

A post over on Reddit notes that when TMobile has been deploying the new Erickson 4460 radios, they are deploying a separate antenna for B25/66 rather than use the mid-band ports on the larger multi-band antenna. 

They are curious why "...when T-Mobile deploys the Ericsson Radio 4460 (capable of B25 + B66), they often connect it to a separate mid-band antenna, and leave the mid-band ports on the low+mid-band array empty.

In this case, they've connected it to a CommScope VV-65A-R1- that one is pretty common, in other cases, I've seen them use a (much older) RFS APX16.

The reason I ask is because both the APX16 and the VV-65A-R1 are seemingly worse than the APXVAARRAPXVAARR24_43-U-NA20 (or APXVAALL24_43-U-NA20 on newer setups) in terms of gain, so there must be something else to this pattern. "

It seems strange to use the Low+Mid and then not use the mid ports (rather than just use discrete low and mid antennas.

Anyone have any ideas?

Link to the Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/t4aosq/what_is_tmobile_doing_with_these_radio_4460s/?sort=confidence

On 2/23/2022 at 7:40 AM, dkyeager said:

My home site is similar. After 8 months, more fiber just arrived at the site.

Honestly, this one is in a horrible location. It is located in a low spot in the area meaning it would only appreciably serve the small area around it. Everything else is better served by one of the other two towers nearby. 

We will see, they have made MANY dumb decisions before.

15 minutes ago, Trip said:

Can anyone confirm whether the S22 supports band locking?

- Trip

 

It does. I can easily band lock on my T-Mobile S22.

I ordered through T-Mobile

Interesting, the tower by the Shell station located just south of 405/522 interchange just got the full upgrade. This dramatically improves capacity in the north Kingsgate area.

Strangely though, the Sprint conversion across the 405 (just south of Cedar Park Christian School) is STILL not live. This site was fully converted months ago, way before the site by the Shell station, but isn't live. My guess is Tmo might have changed their mind about this site since it offers almost no benefit now that the other two nearby sites are live.

4 hours ago, dkyeager said:

I will curious to see if esim support improves with the s22 models. In many cases in the US esim is iPhone only. Also hoping it does not lock to your phone put rather can be moved amount your devices like a physical sim.

Per /u/revik2 (a verified Sprint Corporate Employee) over on Reddit: 

Quote

eSIM activations are not supported for Samsung phones on the Sprint stack, just for select Pixels and iPhones. After your account is migrated to the T-Mobile billing system later down the line you would be able to activate that Samsung with a T-Mobile eSIM.

As for my opinions on the device so far. It seems like a solid incremental improvement over my Note20Ultra:

• The modem is clearly significantly better with my deivce showing a stronger signal and faster data speeds. These speeds get even a bit faster with n71/n41 aggregation . 

• WiFi6 performance is about 100Mbit faster (400-600 rather than 200-400).

• The display is notably snappier with QHD/120Hz

• I wasn't expecting much improvement on the camera but rather surprisingly, the new 100x zoom is actually really damn usable. 

• Edit: Another thing, the fingerprint reader is much much faster than on my old N20U. This is a HUGE improvent.

Just received my phone, time to start transferring everything and getting it setup.