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Sprint LTE in Philly

Muscle Master

Muscle Master

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 15, 2010
581
113
Philadelphia
I might be late but I haven't seen anything official but sprint is turning on major LTE sites in Philadelphia, it's on in my neighborhood (West Oak Lane) and its finally up at the airport

Took a speed test..
ImageUploadedByTapatalk 21368467813.273703.jpg

It's dwarfs in comparison speed wise to Verizon, AT&T, and maybe T-mobile but for unlimited data.. It's fast enough
 
I was at the aquarium two weeks ago in Camden and I was getting LTE not sure if it was from Philly or not but it was working pretty good
 
I'm getting LTE in a lot of places now, the speeds range anywhere from 5-30Mbps depending on signal and location, each week I'm seeing it pop up in different areas. From what I know from s4gru.com the Philly market is around 45% completion and only running the 1900MHz frequency, once the Nextel service is shut down around mid-june you can expect to see LTE and 3G on the 800MHz spectrum which will vastly increase the coverage of both LTE and 3G, so LTE will be just about everywhere if your device supports it which sadly the iPhone 5 won't so you will be stuck with 1900MHz LTE and 800MHz 3G.
 
Yeah that is pretty slow for LTE. Slower than the other 3 carriers but I agree it's fast enough for anything you would need to do on a phone.
 
CEmajr said:
Yeah that is pretty slow for LTE. Slower than the other 3 carriers but I agree it's fast enough for anything you would need to do on a phone.
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Philly is hardly a completed area, there are still tons of towers that need to be rebuilt, when all is said and done speeds should improve quite a bit. I hate people who look at one speediest and say yeah so and so's network is terrible, you bed to look at the average not a single burst speed test. In a lot I markets Verizon LTE is struggling to get over 10Mbps consistently, so Sprint is not doing too bad considering the majority of the network is not upgraded completely yet whereas Verizon's pretty much is.
 
It's not as bad as it looks. Im in a Texas city that's 80ish% complete and I get LTE basically everywhere. When it goes 100% Im not sure Ill notice because all the places Im usually at are covered.

Not sure what the delay is though.
 
CEmajr said:
Wow that's pitiful. It looks like their entire LTE rollout has been delayed like crazy.
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It's been delayed by frakking 6 months. Sprint blames the vendors. Supplies, parts, equipment, etc. Add in a hurricane too. But never themselves. Sprint can never bring itself to admit any fault.

Dan Hesse lost about $200,000 in stock shares in February because of the delay. if you look at the running list above you'll see that my area (Phoenix) does not even have a market announcement date but is scheduled for completion by January, 2014. That's one full year and three months in to my contract with an LTE capable iPhone 5!

Worse yet is that PHX is an Alcatel-Lucent market (Sprint isn't actually doing the work, they hired it all out) and that outfit likes to do the 3G upgrades first, get the towers signed off and then return to do LTE. Stupid!

Sprint likes to defend themselves by claiming that they are replacing everything on the towers. In the same breath they say they have equipment as old as 1998 and then pillory Verizon and AT&T for "bolting" on LTE. They always fail to mention that AT&T and Verizon are doing that because they already ran fiber backhaul and made other upgrades ALREADY! Something Sprint should have done YEARS ago!!!

On top of all this Dan Hesse seems to be living in a J.D. Power Achievement Award fantasy land for customer service. It's the same awful service or worse that it's always been and Sprint management continues to ignore anything that hints of problems. Partly I think that is to avoid opening themselves up to a lawsuit, but most of it has to be because these people are just incompetent. If Sprint's call quality still wasn't good and I wasn't able to avoid CS like I have for the last 14 years I would have been gone a long time ago.
 
eyoungren said:
It's been delayed by frakking 6 months. Sprint blames the vendors. Supplies, parts, equipment, etc. Add in a hurricane too. But never themselves. Sprint can never bring itself to admit any fault.
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Exactly. They blame delays in suppliers from vendors, but it looks like VZW and AT&T have no issue lighting up markets left and right and obtaining supplies.
 
AutoUnion39 said:
Exactly. They blame delays in suppliers from vendors, but it looks like VZW and AT&T have no issue lighting up markets left and right and obtaining supplies.
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Totally agree with you. And when you point that out on the BAW forums they pull the "we're replacing everything, Verizon/AT&T are simply bolting on the equipment" card. Which is BS, because if Sprint had been doing upgrades instead of sitting on their hands (in some cases since 1998) then Sprint would be "bolting" on LTE too.

Instead, Sprint is doing in one go everything the others have already done. Sprint has to run the fiber backhaul. But AT&T/Verizon do not, because they already did that years ago. It's a stupid argument.

Heck, T-Mobile just got LTE in Phoenix.
 
AutoUnion39 said:
Jesus. Boston is STILL not done....
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Sprint's "Boston" is the entire state of Massachusetts, the fact that it's 74% complete is quite impressive, to me at least.

I can't really defend Sprint as the service in my area is terrible, but come on.
 
SONiC5 said:
Sprint's "Boston" is the entire state of Massachusetts, the fact that it's 74% complete is quite impressive, to me at least.

I can't really defend Sprint as the service in my area is terrible, but come on.
Click to expand...

The 74% is a gross overestimate I think. Sprint LTE in Boston is super spotty. There's like one tower covering Brookline (where I live) and one tower in Back Bay with LTE on line. In comparison, AT&T and VZW have the whole area blanketed.

There's ZERO lte coverage in Fenway.
 
AutoUnion39 said:
The 74% is a gross overestimate I think. Sprint LTE in Boston is super spotty. There's like one tower covering Brookline (where I live) and one tower in Back Bay with LTE on line. In comparison, AT&T and VZW have the whole area blanketed.

There's ZERO lte coverage in Fenway.
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I don't think it's an overstatement at all, it's just that Boston is a major city which is more difficult and time consuming to upgrade. I doubt carriers have to jump through as many hoops to upgrade a suburban/rural site.
 
SONiC5 said:
I don't think it's an overstatement at all, it's just that Boston is a major city which is more difficult and time consuming to upgrade.
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Why is that AT&T/VZW (even T-Mobile) don't seem to have any issues upgrading at a fast pace, whereas with Sprint, it's constant excuses?

I wouldn't even be shocked with T-Mobile gets LTE up in Boston by the end of the summer and has every tower in the city covered before Sprint is done ****ing around.
 
AutoUnion39 said:
Why is that AT&T/VZW (even T-Mobile) don't seem to have any issues upgrading at a fast pace, whereas with Sprint, it's constant excuses?

I wouldn't even be shocked with T-Mobile gets LTE up in Boston by the end of the summer and has every tower in the city covered before Sprint is done ****ing around.
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They are most likely playing the waiting game. The technology they buy today will be obsolete in 18 months and I will be replace at 24 months. One problem is that it might take 48 to actually pay for that equipment. All the carriers suffer from this.
 
Sprint has already paid for the equipment. In fact, at least in the case of Alcatel-Lucent, the contract to build out Network Vision has been signed since December, 2010. I have no idea why it took them two years to even friggin start!

T-Mobile expects to have their network done almost by the beginning of 2014. Now to me that's fast because Sprint got started in the middle of 2012 and doesn't expect to be done by mid 2014.

What that says to me is that the maintenance and upgrades that they have neglected to take care of for the last decade or so is finally biting them in the behind. Again, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have all had fiber backhaul placed. Sprint is only just now getting to it and that's a big part of the reason it's taking so dang long. Sprint likes to tout it's planning of NV, but I don't consider having to start from scratch because you never bothered to upgrade anything in years past as good planning.
 
AutoUnion39 said:
Why is that AT&T/VZW (even T-Mobile) don't seem to have any issues upgrading at a fast pace, whereas with Sprint, it's constant excuses?

I wouldn't even be shocked with T-Mobile gets LTE up in Boston by the end of the summer and has every tower in the city covered before Sprint is done ****ing around.
Click to expand...

I think it only appears that way, unlike the other carriers, Sprint allows people to connect to LTE before the market is even launched, and with s4gru.com, there is a lot more information about Sprint's LTE rollout than there is for the other carriers, so while Sprint's LTE rollout feels like it's dragging on forever, in actuality, the pace isn't much different than LTE rollouts on other carriers. I'm sure Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile experienced some delays as well, they just weren't public.

And T-Mobile didn't just begin working on LTE, however it appears that way since they've been firing it up across the nation recently. Both T-Mobile and Sprint started last year, I believe.
 
SONiC5 said:
I think it only appears that way, unlike the other carriers, Sprint allows people to connect to LTE before the market is even launched, and with s4gru.com, there is a lot more information about Sprint's LTE rollout than there is for the other carriers, so while Sprint's LTE rollout feels like it's dragging on forever, in actuality, the pace isn't much different than LTE rollouts on other carriers. I'm sure Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile experienced some delays as well, they just weren't public.

And T-Mobile didn't just begin working on LTE, however it appears that way since they've been firing it up across the nation recently. Both T-Mobile and Sprint started last year, I believe.
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Yeah considering the Philly market is not officially launched no one really has the right to bitch and complain about the speeds or coverage as it's still in testing.
 
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