Wireless / Mobile > Sprint Mobile Broadband > 3G Service in Quad Cities IA/IL Bad

3G Service in Quad Cities IA/IL Bad

You're in the former iPCS territory. They're supposedly "upgrading" those areas. At this point if you want answers your best bet is to call customer care and try to get a ticket in so you can get in touch with an ericsson tech. I wouldn't hold my breath on that though.

Getting tower folks to focus on your issue is usually the best approach, since the Sprint tech folks are largely clueless. But LineNoise is right that it can take a while. In my case, my 3G connection went south in late September and an Ericcson tech finally showed up in my apartment to do serious troubleshooting in March, about a six-month delay. Not pleasant. Sprint genuinely, profoundly and sincerely doesn't give a f**k.

Which is why I've said it before and I'll say it again: We wireless Internet users seriously need our own Tah'rir Square.

reply to chris92
My speeds have started to improve, but I need to get some time, maybe tonight, to call up Sprint.

reply to chris92
For what it's worth, I've spoken with Sprint's network department and they are aware of the issues. They have given me ETAs of July 15 for many of their tower upgrades on the Iowa side of the Quad Cities. No idea on the Illinois side. Hopefully they can get it done by then because the latency and slow throughput is horrible at certain times of the day.

Quad Cities, Galesburg, Peoria, and Bloomington all have had pathetic 3G speeds for months now. Clear has started some work on 4G in Peoria and Bloomington, but nothing has officially launched. Used to be able to stream 128k internet radio all along the I-74 corridor with few drops, now in the best of conditions, you're lucky to be able to stream 128k at all.

reply to chris92
I called Sprint a couple times awhile ago, and they said that they know what the problem is (didn't tell me specifics) and that they should have the problem fixed soon. But I haven't seen that happen; some days it is good, but most days the service is bad during the day. Often I see this:



It seems that they don't have a big enough back-end connection. At around midnight I can get almost 2 Mbp/s. I'd love it if they would get 4G to the area, but that will probably be in a long time.

Well, since July is almost here, I've been speaking with Sprint again regarding their tower upgrades. They are now telling me that the upgrades I mentioned earlier on the Iowa side of the Quad Cities are looking more like August/September instead of July.

I just joined sprint over the weekend and have been running speedtests to make sure I getting the service I'm paying for. I live in northern Davenport and have been getting down speeds around 300kbps, 600kbps tops. The fastest I've seen was 800kbps on the IL side of the river.

I called Sprint today to report the issue. The tech seemed surprised by the slow speeds and said I should be getting at least 1mbps down. He had me restart my phone and tell him a few of the numbers under the battery. After the restart I hit 550kbps down...way under the threshold.

He then checked his monitoring service and saw a data slowdown reported out of Chicago that was causing service degradation as far as Eastern Iowa. He said this was more than likely the result of some kind of upgrade (software, hardware) on their 3G network. He could not provide me with an ETA but assured me that when it was done I would be up to lightning fast.

Long story short, I've confirmed what was posted here and I will be calling back next week if it isnt up to snuff to check again.

reply to goclones
If you believe that I have several bridges for sale. You are seeing congestion and it's the same with all parts of the country and all providers.

300 to 600 down is normal for some areas depending on how loaded the towers are. What speeds have you been led to expect to be "up to snuff"? You did note that the specs call for "UP" to 3 MB Download and "UP" to 1 MB upload. They do not specify any speed. I think they consider anything over 300 MB up ok.

Believe me...I take any generic term like "data slowdown" skeptically.

I would at least expect Sprint to be competitive with others in the market. I have friends on Verizon that are amazed when their 3g drops below 1mbps. Do I expect 3mbps? Of course not...I don't have my own dedicated line (wouldn't that be nice?). I will not, however, be satisfied paying 160/month for a phone plan that isn't competitive or even at 1/2 the accepted minimum (Sprint said under 600kbps down was considered "slow").

More details from sprint today:

I requested to speak to someone in advanced tech. The technician stated that the Davenport tower is running at 10.8% capacity. In other words, only 10.8% of traffic is coming through (hence the huge decrease in speed). He stated that technicians were on site at the tower and he plans to call me back in 4 hours to see if the issue is resolved. They opened a trouble ticket for the location.

I'm inclined to buy into this more because he sounded very surprised at the 10.8% statistic. Hopefully he'll be able to get me more details later.

reply to chris92
it's pretty much the same....I once got 1Mb, then 750, then 600, then 500...500 I now consider speedy

in fact this is best that I usually get from 3PM to 11PM

reply to chris92
I went to the Moline Sprint two days ago to complain again...I talked to a young kid who knew exactly about the problem, but he didn't know anything about how and if they're fixing it at all-he even knew about them pushing dates up, so no luck there.

Today I finally got time for a call to Sprint today (a 41 minute call). I was finally transferred to a technician who could actually look at the tower capacity and whatnot. He didn't see the tower (the tower in Coal Valley) overloaded or anything, but added my account to the "the ticket". I'm not sure if its the ticket for the whole area, or tower, or the one they made for me months ago. He talked about there being problems in eastern Iowa, but not where I live. He also said that the problem should be fixed by July 17 (Great, another date!) and that I can call back to get "my account adjusted" (assuming a month's credit).

At the end of the call I asked about any 4G expansion in the area, but he couldn't find anything on it, besides the Davenport tower.

Any improvement elsewhere in the Quad Cities? Talking to the network department at Sprint, the upgrades in Bettendorf are now scheduled for end of September apparently (it was first July, then August).

reply to chris92
I just came home from a week long trip to worse service. Seems to be an EVDO outage; my Cradlepoint reports the Carrier Status as Down, and the Sprint SmartView connects to EVDO and switches over to 1xRTT. My family who were using it for the past week said it has been very slow.

reply to chris92
Service stopped working again around 2 today. Called sprint up a little bit ago and said that there were 3 other people in the area reporting no service. They said they'd fix it by 2 tomorrow and call back. Posting from my Verizon phone...

reply to chris92
Service (nearly) fixed; speeds got back to "normal" a few hours ago: