Some of you guys in the know enlighten us why it's taking forever for c spire to complete its latest LTE expansion. They issued a press release last year giving specifics, such as what cities would be upgraded and a definite timeframe for its completion. That timeframe ended last November and less than half the rollout is complete. All you get from them is the standard: "We're excited you're excited about our expansion! We're constantly upgrading and will let you know as soon as it's live!" Well that's great, but you did let us know when it would be live and it still is not. This is very frustrating. Anyone else feel the same? Looking at you c spire.
OT-C Spire LTE expansion
- Thread starter oldschool.sixpack
- Start date
They didn't realize how big a competitor AT&T would be. I never use my wi-fi on my iPhone 5S because AT&T's LTE is so fast. I have unlimited data too-grandfathered in from BellSouth Mobility/Cingular Wireless days. Sometimes it pays to stay with the big dogs and not chase every upstart out there.
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We had to switch from AT&T a few years ago because of coverage in MS. My brother is in Mobile and he is with AT&T. Download speeds routinely in excess of 30 Mbps. Ridiculous.
The ONLY place in MS I can't get reception is a small area on 25 right after the Philidelphia exit and just before Louisville. Never had any other problem with AT&T service. I go way out in the country to visit my family and have no service issues. You can get AT&T service in about 90% of the state so your 75% is way off.
Switched to Verizon from ATT years ago and it was the best thing I ever did. ATT would not work inside my house. I had to walk outside ala green acres and I could literally see the blinking light on the tower from my front yard. I have better service at home and work with Verizon but I guess it really depends on your location as to which carrier works best. Verizon also works in Starkville on game day.
I've been fairly disappointed with C-Spire since I made a work-related switch to them from ATT in January. If I had service on my ATT phone (which was nearly 90-95% of the time), it was almost always LTE coverage. The only times I struggled with service was at football games and at our hunting land in remote SW Simpson county. With C-Spire, I'm constantly dropping down to the 1x service not 15 mins from the Jackson metro, constantly have call quality issues, like I'm talking in a tunnel or calls cutting out. You'd think that you'd also get LTE coverage anywhere in the Jackson metro area. I don't get any LTE in the Byram/Terry area, have had spotty coverage when in Clinton or Rankin County. Only place I've had solid coverage is at work in Ridgeland.
And they pay CSpire to use the towers that CSpire built. AT&T is only as competitive in MS as CSpire allows them to be....they don't want to spend the money to build enough towers throughout the state. This is why you have issues with AT&T on game day in MS but not with CSpire.
In eastern tunica and western Tate (where I work) AT&T is by far the best coverage. Vorizin and c-spire suck in that area.
Stadium coverage is because so many AT&T customers in one location trying to get service on same network. The minute you disperse the crowd signal is fine. The reason you can't get a signal on a stadium had nothing to do with coverage. It's all about saturation of the network when large masses are congregated. The reason C Spire works better is there are fewer customers for that network in the vicinity attempting to get on it.
One of my patients who worked for Verizon explained it to me. People who have Verizon can damn near use data in DWS when AT&T customers can't even get service on the old 3G network because of the minimal number of Verizon customers in there as compared to other carriers. Same reason you can't get on State's wi-fi on game day. The network becomes saturated. Now I haven't tried on LTE yet because last year I didn't have LTE service. That's also why more C Spire customers are complaining about their service now. They are approaching C Spire's limit on current infrastructure.
Also why a lot of stadium's are considering the installation of repeaters. Repeaters work to broadcast more bandwidth in certain areas where crowds can easily saturate coverage. I know that AT&T has space rented in DWS for future plans but as of last year Stricklin said AT&T had not approached State about installing repeaters. Auburn installed them before the 2013 season and several people said service was drastically better.
Also why a lot of stadium's are considering the installation of repeaters. Repeaters work to broadcast more bandwidth in certain areas where crowds can easily saturate coverage. I know that AT&T has space rented in DWS for future plans but as of last year Stricklin said AT&T had not approached State about installing repeaters. Auburn installed them before the 2013 season and several people said service was drastically better.
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Verizon works off the old PCS-based towers. As long as you are near major interstates or large cities you are good to go with Verizon's service. And in the event of a disaster like Katrina Verizon customers will be the only ones with service. But if you leave the metro vicinity Verizon service is horrible. My ignorant-*** brother who believes we never landed on the moon(gov't hoax) swears by Verizon while he is walking around my dad's place way out in Puckett trying to find service so he can call.
No, he's actually dead on correct. Why are there traffic jams on 285 in Atlanta? Because there's not enough lanes to move the traffic during rush hour. Same thing when you stick 50K+ people in a very small space and all of them want to use their phones. There's an upper limit on the amount of wireless traffic than can run through at a given time, and when that's limit is reached, you have trouble. What the distributed antenna systems do in all these huge stadiums and arenas is to use multiple antennas to divide the crowd up into smaller chunks, and by doing that you're essentially adding lanes to the highway. The challenge is figuring out how to divide the crowd up effectively so that you evenly divide the capacity load across all the zones, and what happens is some zones have too much capacity relative to some other zones that still stay congested. It's a very tricky thing to figure out, especially given how few events you have each year to optimize it.
You're correct about why Verizon works due to them having fewer customers. That's also why Sprint can advertise the fastest network. They have no customers to load it down. Verizon in MS just happens to be a relative latecomer as opposed to AT&T and CSpire, so even though VZW has acquired some decent spectrum across the state by gobbling up smaller carriers, they still haven't made tremendous inroads to cut into the customers that have AT&T or CSpire.
Most of CSpire's problems on LTE have to do with the frequency bands they're using on LTE. They're presently using a higher frequency band to transmit their LTE, and higher frequencies don't transmit as far. Meanwhile they have 700 MHz spectrum as well, just like AT&T and Verizon, but the 700 MHz band that CSpire has suffers from interference issues due to being next to UHF channel 51, and nobody thus far has developed handsets that work on that band. That's supposed to be worked on in the next couple of years, and once they're able to deploy on that lower band, their LTE coverage should improve pretty dramatically.
As for the bit about the repeaters, I'm afraid that's just incorrect. Repeaters essentially rebroadcast existing capacity to make it cover a larger area. They don't actually increase capacity. You increase capacity by dividing the crowd up into smaller zones, where each zone has the same overall capacity. It's the adding-lanes-to-a-highway analogy, and that's the basis of what's been deployed at Davis Wade, Vaught-Hemingway, Bryant-Denny, you name it.
Verizon does have PCS spectrum (as do AT&T and CSpire, nearly everywhere in the state in some slice or another), but they also have 850 MHz cellular spectrum in the entire state of MS which they picked up by purchasing Rural Cellular and Alltel and Centennial spectrum. Problem is there's only two 850 MHz bands, A and B, and Verizon has A everywhere in MS, which means AT&T and CSpire have the B-band divided between them across the state, so some areas AT&T has better rural coverage and some areas CSpire does just by nature of the spectrum. If Verizon were to ever make significant inroads in customer base in MS, they could be a force to be reckoned with because they've got the spectrum, they just got started really late here.
Sure, AT&T pays to get on CSpire towers, and CSpire pays to get on AT&T towers, and both of them pay to get on other people's towers, and Verizon pays to get on AT&T and CSpire towers, etc, etc....it's the way it works. No company has a monopoly on tower-building, and nobody wants to go build a brand-new tower if there's one there already that'll work.
I have a company phone and we had ATT for years. Driving up to Starkville from the coast I would lose all cell service from just north of Lucedale to just south of Waynesboro (about an hour on Hwy 63). The company switched to Verizon a couple of years back and I have four bars driving that same stretch now.
I'm on AT&T and travel all over the state and am pretty happy w/ the coverage. There are a few pockets in the middle of nowhere where coverage will get dicey sometimes, but mostly in places you wouldn't expect good coverage. Whoever mentioned Hwy 25 south of Louisville is right - that's one dead spot that lasts about 30 mins you wouldn't expect, that needs to be fixed, since it's along a fairly busy 4-lane highway.
What I was told a while back (not sure if it's still true) is that AT&T and CSpire will generally be the best carriers in MS b/c CSpire is home grown, and b/c AT&T traces its roots back to the old MCTA/BellSouth Mobility, where they were trying to build a statewide network from scratch.
What I was told a while back (not sure if it's still true) is that AT&T and CSpire will generally be the best carriers in MS b/c CSpire is home grown, and b/c AT&T traces its roots back to the old MCTA/BellSouth Mobility, where they were trying to build a statewide network from scratch.
I've lived in the middle of Jackson and now live in Madison and couldn't get a signal with AT&T without standing in my driveway. Haven't had a problem at all with Verizon, and it's great on gameday!
J-Dawg, you may have phone issues. I've been w/ C-Spire almost 14 yrs and have none of what you just described and I assure you I would have changed long ago if I did (I live in Jackson metro also). My wife and kids are also CSpire and don't have the issues either. The only place I have issues is in my fortress of an office which has concrete and rebar filled block walls and a corrugated metal ceiling w/ concrete poured on it for the 2nd floor. Otherwise no dropped calls, quality issues etc. My only complaints w/ them is their website just absolutely downright SUCKS arse and I don't particularly like all the fluffy advertising they do i.e. sponsoring sporting events (high school football, golf tournaments, 5K's, MS Sports Hall of Fame) , concerts, sports talk radio, etc etc. Just lower my calling plan price and leave the fluff to somebody else please.
That sounds more logical to me. I couldn't remember exactly how the guy described it. Regardless, Stricklin needs to tell AT&T to either consider repeaters or he will take that space back and use it to store cups in. We are bringing in more money than ever. We don't need someone taking up space at our stadium that isn't planning on using it.
Made that drive once. Horrible road from Lucedale to Waynesboro. But really no other option.
My AT&T phone worked just fine inside the stadium this year. AT&T added a tower or something inside the stadium and it worked fine most of the time. I could at least send texts and make calls, getting on twitter and such was a struggle, but at a game, I'm not to worried about that stuff. Also, with the grandfathered in plan and not using wifi: they cannot charge you for going over on data, but they do bump you down if you use a certain amount. Like LTE goes to 4G after a certain amount, and 4G goes to 3G after a certain amount. If you are on a wifi then that doesn't count.
I'll also add that on Lakeland Drive(Hwy 25 part that goes through metro Jackson area) on the older networks with Cingular and BellSouth Mobility I would always drop calls approaching the bridge over Flowood Drive near where the Air Guard base is. This was because of the airport though. The service would return near where Dogwood Festival is now. The newer networks are drastically better. I have never dropped a call on an iPhone.
