Interesting find - new Spark replacement tower next to Drury southbound onramp has NRCA - 100mhz n78 + 10mhz n5!

Just watch out on grey market device imports. Some devices such as the Oppo find x7 don’t support the full new Zealand Band 28 range. On paper it says Band 28 but in practice it’s a subset. They will work on spark (as they are bottom of the band 28 range). Spark spectrum fits  in the Band 28A subset. One.NZ and 2degrees are in the 28B subset. China and even India sourced devices sometimes don’t support our full band 28 range. This will be to the detriment of customer experience as Band28 provides most cell edge and rural coverage 

Went to Auckland today and saw in a load of places with One NR-CA of n78+n7. Standalone must surely be imminent.

LOL I looked all over Auckland yesterday for n7 and couldn't find any! I did see some sites still operating L2600 so obviously still some work to do before they can roll out NR2600 more widely.

Might be that your device hasn’t been opened up for nr2600 band 7. Someone else picked it up so my thinking is your device may not be scanning for it. 

Spotted for the first time on my drive to work some L900 in parts of Christchurch.

Only 5mhz wide.

MaxineN:

 

Spotted for the first time on my drive to work some L900 in parts of Christchurch.

 

Only 5mhz wide.

 

Where was this roughly? I'd be interested to take a look in.

boosacnoodle:

 

MaxineN:

 

Spotted for the first time on my drive to work some L900 in parts of Christchurch.

 

Only 5mhz wide.

 

 

Where was this roughly? I'd be interested to take a look in.

 

Merivale, towards the north end of Hagley Park. Will be driving down that part again so can get a NetMonster cap.

Some sites around Auckland/Northland/Wellington has had 5Mhz L900 for a while.

Some (if not all) of the new builds have L900 so could try looking at any new sites built in the last couple of months? Maybe just a AKL thing however as Northland has heaps of L900 added to exisiting older sites.

Plan is probably to increase the BW to 15 MHz when 2G/3G is shut down.

Yeah noticing heaps of One NZ around the Waikato now running 5MHz of L900 :)

scottjpalmer: What are your Android weapons of choice for determining this stuff?

In terms of software? You can just dial *#*#4636## (although some dialers disable this, looking at you Samsung). You can also use NetMonster as well.

In terms of devices? I just use my Pixel 9 Pro XL. 

MaxineN:

scottjpalmer: What are your Android weapons of choice for determining this stuff?

In terms of software? You can just dial *#*#4636## (although some dialers disable this, looking at you Samsung). You can also use NetMonster as well.

In terms of devices? I just use my Pixel 9 Pro XL. 

scottjpalmer: What are your Android weapons of choice for determining this stuff?

I use NetMonster as well. A paid alternative is Net Monitor (which has a lite version I haven't really used for a while).

Feel free to DM me your email address and I can send you a database file of many 2deg/OneNZ/Spark cells in/around Auckland in either NetMonster or Net Monitor format. That way you get the actual locations of the sites instead of NetMonster's guesses. My database files also has some data for Northland/Waikato/Wellington.

MaxineN: In terms of software? You can just dial *#*#4636## (although some dialers disable this, looking at you Samsung). You can also use NetMonster as well.

Samsung phones have *#0011# which dumps lots of interesting data including what carriers are being used for CA etc. Format differs depending on whether you have a Qualcomm or Samsung chipset but generally output incldues similar data.

Nice! Benefit of having Lte900 (band 8) is from what I can see around 80% of devices that don’t support LTE700 (Band 28)  support Band 8. So those grey market US /China/ India sourced phones that don’t support B28 should have better LTE coverage with that deployment. Likely 100’s of thousands of such devices out there. Should help their experience through 3G switchoff too. Wonder if other operators will follow suite or doing so already to?