I live in lake charles, LA. If u look on clears website u will see that 4g is not officially released but my area its light green. We do have 4g as I do use it. I get connection speeds between 5mbs to 10mbs. The speed varies allot I'm not sure y but I usually have about 2 bars at my location. But my question is from the point it is released unofficially (test phase) to the point it is fully expanded to the area and official. How long does that take. Reason I ask is because we have had 4g going on 3 months but its only about a 2-3 mile radius and once complete on average how big of a radius will it cover?
Sent by my evo 4g using sprint 4g network.
I know that when I purchased the Evo I was kind of upset that I didn't have 4G because of my area. Now i'm onto the ET4G and still no 4g =/. What's my solution? Move to the city to get 4G? Curious I suppose and its a shame to have a 4g capable phone and not get 4g network.
Trust me I was with ATT and didn't get 4g either and not even 3G because a lot of there network isn't even 3G build yet. And they are way more expensive. Though now I at least have 3g with Sprint.
Sent from my SPH-D710 using XDA App
i hate to be the one to break the news to you bro. all the WiMax 4g towers that are currently installed and operational right now are all the 4g WiMax towers there ever will be. Sprint canned it since it was on a not power/non building penetrating frequency of like 2.6 ghz or something. verizon i beleive uses like 700mhz or something close to that which allows the single to penetrate buildings deeper and travel farther. Sprint just anounced its "Sprint Visions" plan i beleive its called. What it entails apon aproval from the FCC i beleive since its 20 or 40 mhz away from the GPS frequency. they are moving to LTE towers like Verizon. what does this mean for your WiMax handset? it will never see the light of day with 4g. it will not work on LTE as the 4g chip does not work on those frequncys. in early 2012 sprint will start to release new handsets with the new radio chip in them. i beleive they said it should all be deployed within 3 years? also that are moving to Rev B 3g so its faster. also will be able to use the internet and phone voice calls at the same time. they use all the push to talk nextel for the new 3g or something like that. idk, people if you know whats the plan better than i please feel free to correct me. but thats just the general idea of whats happening
You summed it up pretty well. WiMax won't be expanded, but it will continue to be supported for a few years. Sprint actually basically has 3 types of connections. EVDO, Nextel's PTT, and WiMax. They'll be able to put a multi-band antenna up at all the disparate sites, providing some awesome coverage! Of course this is still a ways away.
4g
Sprint hasn't canned 4g in my state they just put up two more towers one in my town and one about 6 miles outside the north side indy which will make a total of 4 towers in indy and that doesn't include the iu and iupui campuses. And they are putting up more so i don't know where you got your info that sprint canned 4g but they aren't now we are hosting the super bowl and that could be why They are putting up towers left and right in my city.
Sprint hasn't canned 4g, but is changing over to lte next year. All of this information came from the investment talk they gave I believe at the start of October. Sprint covered how this would work and that work on the towers was starting in order to move to the new 4g. Wimax will still run side by side with lte for a few years.
Now that I've had the GN for a couple weeks and am back on Verizon I have some observations about cell coverage. I've had cell phones since 1995 and for most of that time (1995-2008) I was on Verizon. I traveled a good bit so having a carrier with good nation wide coverage was important.
But that was before I had a smart phone and in 2008 I got my first smart phone, the iPhone 3G. Switching to the iPhone meant dropping Verizon and going with ATT -- something I wasn't happy about due to past issues I had with ATT. When I first got the iPhone 3G service was still kind of new and the talk was that you had to turn 3G off to get good battery life out of the iPhone. Within a few months the 3G coverage by ATT was pretty good and I didn't worry about battery life all that much
Move into 2010 and I switched the iPhone for an HTC Evo 4G and, of course, that meant dropping ATT in favor of Sprint. The 4G (WiMax) coverage that Sprint provided was almost nonexistent in Jun 2008 but Sprint was promising a rapid roll out of WiMax so I waited. Turns out that in the 15 months I had the Evo Sprint (Clear) did a sh*ty job of deploying Wimax and as my job puts me on the road 85% of the time I was able to judge there coverage in many parts of the country.
OK, so on 12/23/2011 I picked up the GN and am now on Verizon again. In that time I've been in Salt Lake City, Atlanta and Albany NY and I've had 4G LTE coverage everywhere I've been. SLC got WiMax at the end of Jun 2010 and the WiMax coverage was spotty more than 15 months later. I wasn't able to find a place in the greater SLC are that I couldn't get LTE...
As I said I travel a lot and am at present working at a FAB in Malta NY, about 25 miles north of Albany in a tiny little berg that could pass for Mayberry. My Evo had terrible coverage here with seldom more than a single bar and often times no coverage at all -- you know, the kind of coverage where you step outside to see if that helps. But, in this tiny little berg my GN is getting 5 bars of LTE with over 17Mbps -- consistent. I'm even getting 5 bars inside the FAB.
So, my take on this is that... Sprint has crumby service or no service whereas ATT and Verizon have good coverage. Verizon started rolling out 4G about 6 months after Sprint started rolling out 4G but in less time Verizon has long since passed Sprint by.
Now don't get me wrong, there are thing about the the way Verizon and ATT do business that pisses me off and on paper they cost more but they are light years better than Sprint.
In the time since I've had smart phones I've traveled to: California (all over), Virginia (all over), North Carolina, Texas (Dallas/Richardson mostly), Idaho (Boise), New York (all over), Utah (all over), Nevada, and many other places so I think I can say with some experience that my coverage analysis is based on more than one area. I could never get 4G on my Evo at ANY airport at any time -- I've been able to get LTE at EVERY airport so far!
Brian
I could have sworn I read something somewhere about Sprint or ATT starting to roll out LTE, I guess it's the future standard.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk
Sprint WiMax runs at 2.5GHz which is really really crappy spectrum. There's plenty of capacity per MHz but it attenuates really quickly and has terrible in-building penetration. Verizon's 700MHz LTE spectrum attenuates much more slowly and penetrates walls much better. To cover the same area, Sprint has to deploy 3x-5x as many cell sites as Verizon.
aindow said:
I could have sworn I read something somewhere about Sprint or ATT starting to roll out LTE, I guess it's the future standard.
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Sprint has announced it will start rolling out LTE in 2012. AT&T is already rolling out LTE.
ianwood said:
Sprint WiMax runs at 2.5GHz which is really really crappy spectrum. There's plenty of capacity per MHz but it attenuates really quickly and has terrible in-building penetration. Verizon's 700MHz LTE spectrum attenuates much more slowly and penetrates walls much better. To cover the same area, Sprint has to deploy 3x-5x as many cell sites as Verizon.
Sprint has announced it will start rolling out LTE in 2012. AT&T is already rolling out LTE.
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Yep, WiMax drops off more significantly inside due to the spectrum. Where I live in SLC the Sprint tower closest to me is just over a mile away and inside my apartment it's maybe one bar and often no bars of WiMax and even outside it seldom rises above one bar. That WiMax may need 2X or more the towers to provide the same coverage is only half the problem -- the other half is that Sprint seems to have less than half as many towers!
I think ATT will be relatively aggressive in rolling out LTE, but Sprint, well, I wouldn't hold my breath!
Brian
Verizon has done a great job of not only getting LTE in many markets, but also completely saturating that market and surrounding areas. I used to work in a suburb just outside of Minneapolis. WiMax was nonexistent at my work. I didn't even bother connecting to wimax most of the time because it would connect to one tower and drop before it picked up the next tower. With Verizon I have yet to leave 4g until I'm surrounded by corn fields. At my old employer the only one with 4g service was Verizon. We had wifi but only a T1 pipe to share with the entire office. Things got a little slow when everyone is streaming Pandora.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk
teamgreen02 said:
Verizon has done a great job of not only getting LTE in many markets, but also completely saturating that market and surrounding areas. I used to work in a suburb just outside of Minneapolis. WiMax was nonexistent at my work. I didn't even bother connecting to wimax most of the time because it would connect to one tower and drop before it picked up the next tower. With Verizon I have yet to leave 4g until I'm surrounded by corn fields. At my old employer the only one with 4g service was Verizon. We had wifi but only a T1 pipe to share with the entire office. Things got a little slow when everyone is streaming Pandora.
Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk
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I noticed this as well. When Verizon rolled out LTE in Chicago, they rolled it out as far as my school in Kenosha, Wisconsin which is at least 50 miles away from Chicago. A pleasant surprise.
No doubt Sprint has struggled and will continue to struggle. WiMax was the wrong bet. Sprint has racked up debt, recently cut back unlimited data plans for air cards/hotspots, and will do the same for mobile phones. On top of that, their current broadband network stinks and LTE roll-out will be very slow. I wouldn't sign up with Sprint any time soon.
22/10 in downtown with 5 bars where i used to only have 3
Doesn't look like the LTE upgrade made it very far away from downtown. Checking up near Gibsonia, there's no LTE service.
When tmob releases the T999L will it still support HSPA+ and will you be able to switch between the two? It would be nice in case you are in an area where one is a stronger signal than the other or LTE uses too much battery and you want to use HSPA+ instead. Thanks.
I believe so. T-Mobile is pushing a "Dual 4G" premise where both LTE and HSPA+ serve as 4G. So HSPA+ will be a fall back in most metropolitan areas. I live in a big city, so I expect LTE earlier than most people. HSPA+ as a fallback is not bad for me since I can get about 12-16 mbps for download speeds, which is great With LTE, I expect around 25 mbps.