Mobay contingency, I'm seeing where FLOW's pretty much wrapped up their LTE upgrades.... They've also done ANOTHER HSPA+ capacity upgrade and they seem to have turned up the power on 850 MHz, which seemed to cause a ton of call drops last week (I counted about 7 on a SINGLE call). Now that all that is sorted and it's near September, the network will be on-air in a few days or so... It's been in testing since May/early June (when the first test site went on-air to test IMEIs).
Here's a few other curious observations...
- Calls on 3G almost always maintain AMR-NB 12.2 Kbps (top end of the codec)... a marked improvement.
- LTE is the top band priority; devices are being instructed to select the LTE (if in manual search mode and you toggle airplane mode, you'll see LTE)
- literally ALL of Montego Bay as far as I've seen, has LTE coverage... to include Downtown, Fairview, Hip Strip, North Coast Highway out to Trelawny etc.
- Like Kingston, Postpaid takes priority; 150 Mbit/s down for them, 50 Mbit/s for Prepaid.
Thats good to know, I was reading an short article on nationwide news website. They have a audio clip with the Managing Director Stephen Price. He was indicating that by the end of October, they will have rolled out another 144 LTE sites. I am wondering how many they have so far?, and where will these new sites be. I suppose the bulk of these sites will be in the KMR (Kingston, ST Andrew, Portmore), what do you think?.
http://nationwideradiojm.com/flow-to...rove-services/
Well, before they began upgrading new sites in May, they had around 44 LTE sites, all in the KMA.... Now the 188 LTE sites they'll have will be inclusive of the KMA (to include Portmore, Spanish Town and additional sites in Kingston to blanket the entire city in coverage), Ocho Rios, Montego Bay metro area and Mandeville + a few tourist spots on the South Coast (FLOW's raking in the big bucks from a roaming agreement with Verizon. According to Verizon, Jamaica's in the top 10 destinations Verizon users buy TravelPasses to roam in, The ranking is Mexico, Canada, United Kingdom, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Jamaica, Australia and Israel). Having LTE there is a must!
OK, this is good to Know. I can see why Flows roll out is aggressive in the Tourist areas of Jamaica. I wanted to ask though, can a LTE Tower in Half Way Tree provide coverage on Spanish Town road at the Haile Selassie High School?. I know AWS spectrum travels across the longer distances, but Since according to opencell ID. My tower covers Spanish Town road, Half Way Tree and some parts of downtown. So I was wondering how far or close towers have to be, to cover a large area of people.
No problem! Also, give this a read... far more than what was on the Nationwide article. They're confirming their new LTE sites and also about to expand their 4G network as well (through the co-location agreement with Digicel I presume)
As usual, I was doing some late night perusing and decided to check FLOW's site to see if they've done any updates to their site... Didn't see much until I happened upon a link to FLOW Jamaica's LTE page... Apparently it's unlinked (for good reason). It's quite bare but I assume that once it's linked it'll have more information.
https://discoverflow.co/jamaica/mobile/LTE
A launch is imminent I presume...
Last edited by Brandysull; Aug 20, 2017 at 02:49 AM.