Verizon: Cable Deal Delayed Spectrum Apocalypse a Few Years > Actually.. their will never be a Spectrum Apocalypse..

reply to tkdslr

Re: Actually.. their will never be a Spectrum Apocalypse..

Concur, but a lot of people (myself included) ask this question: Why aren't they making full use of what they already have? My old hometown had a heavily congested 3G network, to the point of sub-dialup speeds during the day. In that market they own the Cellular B license, along with the PCS C and F blocks.

Near as I can tell, they don't use the PCS licenses for anything. None of my phones ever connected on the PCS bands, for voice or data, nor have any of the other ones I have access to. The only time I saw a phone connect to PCS was when it was within range of a Network Extender (femtocell). Granted, PCS doesn't have the reach of cellular, but deploying services on PCS would have alleviated some of the burden on the cellular data channel(s), so why not do it?

Kind of surprised that they could do that without running afoul of FCC regulations, but I've got an easy answer as to why they don't have anything on that band: PCS C and F are adjacent, allowing for 20MHz of uninterrupted FD spectrum. The iPhone, at least, supports 20MHz FD-LTE channels in PCS. So if Verizon can keep their PCS holdings unoccupied, they can (someday) turn on an FD-LTE network that will blow the doors off anything short of Clearwire, and with more coverage.

So there's a method to VZW's madness in this case.

Hmm, interesting take on it. I hadn't considered that. I still wonder why they are content to let the 3G network deliver such atrocious performance. I had hoped it would get better up there when they lit up the 4G network but it hasn't, there are still portions of my commute where the 3G network is virtually unusable. I can even identify the individual base stations that are always congested, and accordingly plan my usage of the network during my lengthy commute to work. If they lit up IS-95/EvDo services on PCS would they be able to reuse some of the equipment (antennas and cabling, if nothing else) for a future LTE deployment? Is an antenna an antenna or does LTE need some special antenna configuration that isn't compatible with other air interfaces?

Another random thought, but if they had the PCS bands lit up, perhaps the network wouldn't have failed us so quickly during the floods last year? They lost a number of low lying base stations, and the remaining ones simply couldn't handle the load. For about three days we had great difficulties using the voice network, it ranged from "try ten times and your call will go through" to "doesn't work at all unless you make your call at 3am", depending on where you were. There were even periods when SMS stopped working. This was a minor inconvenience to me, I stayed dry and have a POTS line, but it was huge problem for the first responders, as well as the people who got displaced.

In that same vein, I've wondered why they didn't kill the EvDo network during the floods, so they'd have an extra channel or two for the voice network. Surely voice services are more important than data during a natural disaster? The EvDo network wasn't usable anyway, but it was still turned up, and I've always wondered why.

Without going into too much detail (I'll do that later), LTE antennas...and the radios behind them...are configured quite differently (ideally) than legacy CDMA gear. Look up Remote Radio Heads to see what I'm talking about.

As for why they didn't kill EvDO in favor of voice, I'm pretty sure that an EvDO line card can't do 1x, and vice versa.

Probably lack of available line cards.