[EVO 4G General] bitbang3r:
I'm surprised that Hialeah is completely dark so far -- it's high-density, mostly middle-class, and has no zoning standards (relatively speaking) to get in the way of speedy and efficient tower construction. Similarly, I'm surprised that there isn't a line of towers along NW 7th Street to cover 836 and Fountainbleau. Fountainbleau in particular is high-density AND has lots of young transient renters who'd be a natural market for home wimax broadband (take it with you when you move, instead of getting hit with an ETF for terminating service that's tied to a specific street address).

I'd like to be proven wrong, but I suspect the 9mbit/sec speeds we're seeing now are likely to just be a fond memory by Christmas. Right now, most Evo & Epic owners haven't even realized yet that pockets of 4G already exist (mostly because they just turned it off to save battery life months ago and forgot about it), so we're kind of the early elite enjoying what's practically our own personal cell towers for now. Years ago, I was literally BellSouth's first ASDL customer at my exchange. The day they installed it, I pegged DUmeter at 1.56mbit/sec downloads. Three months later, I was lucky to see 600kbit/sec sustained, because they had ALL of us sharing the same T-1 backhaul from the DSLAM to their network operations center elsewhere in Miami. It wasn't until a month or two after that that they finally upgraded the backhaul and got me back up to around 1.2mbit/sec).

Another possibility is that Sprint might be switching their 3G sites over to the new 4G backhaul. Sprint is notorious for having way more spectrum than backhaul bandwidth (how many Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile customers have you ever heard complaining because they had a call go straight to voicemail even though they weren't using the phone at all, and had 3 or 4 bars of signal strength? Now try mentioning it around Sprint customers, and watch the room come alive with complaints. I know for a fact that Sprint (at least USED to ) have quite a few cell sites in Miami that were capable of handling WAY more calls than their actual wires leading back to the switching office could physically handle. Think of it as being kind of like a PBX with 128 virtual lines, and 24 actual phone lines for incoming and outgoing calls. All 128 users might get 4 bars of signal strength, but when call #25 comes in, it's going straight to voicemail because all the physical lines are in use. Sprint was in kind of a unique position in this respect, because it's traditionally been the only carrier with radio spectrum to burn. Other carriers were constrained mainly by radio spectrum, and ran into spectrum limits long before backhaul trunk capacity was even a concern. Also, because Sprint had so much 1900MHz spectrum, in many areas it started using a portion of that spectrum to do backhaul as well. Where they ran into trouble was in the areas where they started to have a little too much activity to handle with half their spectrum dedicated to backhaul, but not enough to make them want to pay the local phone company to run one or more T1 lines out to the cell site.

If Sprint suddenly switches an EVDO site's backhaul-bandwidth-starved users over to the same backhaul as its 4G wimax, the EVDO users will instantly soak up a HUGE chunk of its surplus, and create the same problem for wimax -- 100 megabits/sec worth of collective radio bandwidth fighting over 45 megabits/second worth of T-3 network bandwidth. Put another way, lots of the people who are getting 200-300kbps EVDO speeds aren't limited by EVDO or spectrum bandwidth... Sprint's connection to the internet itself is what's saturated.