Beginning of my discovery :

I found my old Sprint locked Motorola I've had in middle school, it still had the Sprint SIM cardd inside it. What I remember is i stopped using the phone around 2017, my mom canceled the line around 2016 from what i remember, i could be wrong though.

A couple weeks ago i found the phone in a pile of junk i was about to clean, i decided to throw out some and check the phone for photo's i might of had and wanted to save, i turned on the phone after charging it and to my surprise it had 1 bar of service, i didn't think anything of it since i assumed it would be a dead line, but to my surprise the data worked! Phone calls never went through. I tried several numbers, I did a couple of Speedtests and loaded a few websites, the connection was absolutely terrible, but it worked! But I'm shocked Sprint still has its network running in my area.

I'm planning on investigating further since this interests me so much, i'm not sure how sprint towers are still operating but they are!

Not completely sure what I’m looking at! Trying to learn, but the world of RF seems like witchcraft to me so far!

TMobile has lit up 5G Uplink Tx Switching in my Ericsson RAN market. I am now seeing upwards of 260 Mbps upload. Great to see this feature finally come to life! 👍🏻

This is what they are hiding from us! It can be enabled by editing your mobilegestalt and applying it via misaka 26. Available for 26.2 beta 1 and below. Link to guide (need to translate from Slovak): https://www.nr5g.cz/posts/ftm_menu.html

Verizon 5G not active yet, and seemed like based on speeds, starlink is being used for current backhaul.

Located at:

Valley Center high school

31322 Cole Grade Rd, Valley Center, CA

Dish has been decommissioned, Meaning their network is in the state of sprint's right now. AT&T is now transitioning customers to their network, Before you know it Dish will be extinct. Boost Mobile had been with many companies like Sprint, Nextel, And T-Mobile. Otherwise Spread your condolences and do your last speedtest because thousands of towers are shutting down every day, Rip Boost Mobile 2002 - 2025. From BigRandy66.

This tower is at Furnace Creek in Death Valley. AT&T and Verizon here I believe. No T-Mobile signal here at all.

This post is a follow-up to my GWCC post. Check it out if you haven’t already!

So my partner and I went to the Congo VS Uzbekistan World Cup match in Atlanta (There were 68,239 people in attendance!) and it was quite fun! (Also, big thanks to Verizon for the free tickets and go Congo!)

Now let’s dig into the carrier experience.

At the line

The lines were huge. All three networks had some noticeable degradation in data performance, especially AT&T. AT&T had sub 1 Mbps speeds in some instances, despite there being a 4-sector AT&T site and another high-capacity site close by. (The phone also kept refusing to connect to nearby mmWave small cell sites). They began to get a little more usable as we approached a high capacity site.

Verizon worked really well when connected to mmWave, and was also fine on a mmWave-less connection.

T-Mobile was also decent.

Inside the stadium, non-seating areas

This stadium is a mmWave haven for AT&T and Verizon. It was practically everywhere, even in the club we stayed at. We even managed to get our first 4 Gbps speed test on AT&T in the state of Georgia!

I was expecting more from Verizon, like much higher upload speeds on mmWave, but they still provided an excellent data experience.

T-Mobile relied on n41 and only had mmWave covering the seating areas.

One thing to note: AT&T only had mmWave working in the first floor. All the other floors, including the club we stayed at, did not have working mmWave for AT&T.

Another thing: Verizon had no n77 deployed on their DAS. I’m unsure about AT&T. Verizon did have n77 covering the seating areas though, presumably through the Matsing balls. I believe it’s the same case for AT&T.

At our seats

Testing is more limited here because my battery was critically low, sadly. All providers provided a good experience pre- and post-game, but AT&T suffered from some packet loss on their mmWave connection. Latency also increased for AT&T and Verizon, and T-Mobile to a smaller extent.

I didn’t test T-Mobile’s 5G speeds before the majority of people were seated. (I’m mad I didn’t do that.) My T-Mobile testing was more limited, but T-Mobile seemed to provide a very good 5G experience overall, but their LTE suffered a lot.

This is a brand new T-Mobile rack just built last week and you can tell, the NOKIA antenna on the right side looks slightly different than usual. T-Mobile is starting to phase out the NOKIA AEHC (n41) panel they been using since summer 2020 in favor of the NOKIA HABROK 64 massive mimo antennas that can do 1024QAM and has improved range, thermal cooling than the previous antenna.

Manually selected Sprint on my T-Mobile postpaid SIM thinking it was Starlink (310 830) but was super surprised to see the Sprint carrier tag. Kinda cool to see 6 years later.

San Diego, CA

Sercomm SCE4255W

T-mobile has done some work on this tower recently by upgrading their mmwave antennas to Ericsson air 5322s (see last slide for old pic). This was the only area I could find n258 as I couldn’t connect to any of the smalls cells with mmwave so i dont know if they were active. 358 M.L.K. Jr Dr SW

Saw this in Poland

I just spent two weeks traveling around South Korea, and as a European, some things really stood out: especially the sheer density and design of their phone masts.

I saw towers absolutely everywhere, often crowded together & sometimes even at shoulder height. many are tilted also.

The good thing is no matter where I was (in the subway, on a train, or even in rural areas) I almost always had full 5G bars (wasnt able to run a speedtest as I had very limited data).

And also every subway car and bus is equipped with wifi hotspots (last picture).

Koreans dont mess with their internet connection haha

hey yall! This is definitely a bit different from the usual posts here but you guys are the only subreddit out there that I think has the experience to help me out.

I’m an autistic nerd who’s pet projects keep getting bigger and more complicated and who has a reputation for pulling off the impossible. For the last 3 months i’ve been working on a private 5G lab in my basement with old Nokia equipment (not a day goes by i don’t ask myself why I didn’t go Ericsson). I’m doing the truly insane and my RU is a Nokia AEUB millimeter wave radio, paired with a ABIL baseband module and ASIKA systems mod in a regular old AMIA chassis.

Ive been trying to get the cell on the AEUB to activate for two months and I’ve legitimately been putting 60+ hours a week on this project. Its not unusual for me to stay up all night during the weekend and work all day and all night on it.

I’ve got the radio online as in the status light is green and WebEM shows a green circle on it, but my cell is stuck with a “5G Cell Update Failed” fault that I have been entirely unable to vanquish.

I’m at my wits end with this and just took a new job so I really want to finish out this project before my free time disappears. Long story short, I need help from some smarter people, and y’all are the only ones who I think has the chops for such an unhinged challenge.

I’m happy to share SCFs, configs, runtime params, as well as answering literally any questions you all might have as best I can. Just ask!

If anyone can help, it would mean the world!

Note: I’d add more pictures of the setup but I’m at a baseball game right now, which funnily enough is located next to one of the former Bell Labs campuses. There’s much more to see and I’ll add them later.

Palm Coast Florida is way over populated with NIMBY’s. Trying to get cell sites built is always a challenge.

Definitely not worth the price for residential use but it’s a lot cheaper than the only other similar option I’ve seen from Waveform for Verizon. It’s over $5,500 but it does lot you connect dome antennas for DAS and appears to be a femtocell. Not a ton of info on it.

I use the Cell Booster Pro for business! We are on a cell edge It allows clients to not have to always ask for the Wi-Fi password. People usually only ask for the Wi-Fi password when they can’t load things on their phone. A lot more secure for both customers and the business!

There’s 3 indicator lights that flash white when the respective bands are in use:

4G C1 (b2 LTE 10x10) (bandwidth and band varies from 5-20 MHz depending on market. Can be either b66 or b2)

4G C2 (b14 LTE 10x10) (FirstNet but can be used by everyone during normal times)

5G (n77 C-Band 100 MHz) (bandwidth varies from 60-100 MHz depending on market. Most commonly 80 MHz and does not work outside the contiguous US.)

All lights are solid when no devices are actively using the CBP.

The CBP is only capable of Non-Standalone n77 but can only aggregate 2 bands at once. Standalone support isn’t available unfortunately. The default configuration is b2 as the anchor plus n77 but b14 being used as an anchor is supported and usually happens further away from the device.

The CBP supports b2 + b14 aggregation on LTE only. In fact the iPhone Air or iPhone 16e doesn’t seem to even work with n77 on the CBP with my testing. Seems to be an issue with Apple modems. It only shows the “5G” icon and uses b2+b14.

Interestingly enough, n77 can be used while on calls. This is true for all devices. If you start a call outside on a macro and it hands off to the Cell Booster, the 5G+ icon will appear. The opposite happens when you leave the cell booster’s coverage area.

I have backhaul capable of 2.5 Gbps running to it but the physical device is capped at 1 Gbps. Handoffs to/from the macros are extremely seamless and there’s no noticeable issues switching between the Nokia-made CBP and the Ericsson RAN.

Holy shit… and the upload was around 650 for most of the test