Re: Little Rock/Central AR LTE
This backward state we live in is a big reason we haven't seen more expansions in Arkansas. I wouldn't be surprised if approval is what is holding us up here, and probably in Paragould too. In January, one of the tower companies tried to get approval to build a new tower here to provide AT&T HSPA+, AT&T sucks here. When you walk in a building, signal is gone. They need that tower. Well, one of the board members, who is (no lie) in his 80's, happened to live next to the proposed site, he cried fears that the tower would fall on his house. I have never heard of a tower falling. The company wanting to build the tower explained, in the very unlikely event that something caused the tower to fail, that it is designed to collapse into itself within the fenced in compound. That wasn't enough. They just approved this tower last month, but for a new location a block down the road from the original site.
Paragould has the slowest cable internet, probably in the country. The entire town is fed with 310 MBPS. The cable company is a locally owned and ran monopoly, that ran the other cable co outta town with cheaper prices, then jacked the prices when competition was gone. They're controlled by a very corrupt city board. And they fight any new provider wanting to offer high bandwidth service in the area. 3 major cable providers have tried to set up service there, but are always voted down. You can only get AT&T dsl in a few limited parts of the town, because of a non-competition agreement with the cable co, as they purchase that 310 MBPS from AT&T. So I bet they're fighting tooth and nail to keep LTE out of that town. Everyone is fed up with 40 a month for 2 MBPS and actually getting .8 or .9 on a good day. Even my technically challenged friends there realize how awful it is, but no one can really do anything about it. When you call the cable co about slow service, their solution is to move you to the 65 dollar a month 6 MBPS package, where you actually get about 1.5 down and 256k up.
Sorry for the long post, just pointing out how backwards Arkansas is. Maybe once the "good ole' boys" get too old to work or die off, we'll start to see progress!