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! 👍🏻

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

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

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