Will Northeast MI ever receive 3G?

No changes here yet.

does Lovells have 3G yet?

Well hopefully the 3G signal i got near the southeast shore of Shupac Lk is a little stronger. That was back in early Oct.  I could get 1-3 bars and do stuff. Was good enough to stream espn and netflix.  Just had to keep my phone toward the lake side of the cabin.

I hope they use Microwave from a neighboring site to get that tower up and running soon because that tower covers a fairly large area. My tablet has actually held 1 bar of 3G while sitting in front of the site but switches to E when heading back to Lewiston on 612.

I would have to think you were on either the Red Oak site or the tower near Waters (east side of 75). Sites in Gaylord, Otsego Lake, Waters, and Frederick are now running LTE. 

where exactly is the lovells tower located?

  This is the exact location of that site. You can't see it at all in Lovells unless you drive down Old 612 by the township hall. On the satellite view of Google maps you can see it as well.

  You should get an excellent signal when they fire it up and I believe by late summer when most of Michigan has LTE, AT&T will put more of their resources on these problem sites and get them online sooner.

Thanks. I might take a look at it.

Still no change here. They must have ran into problems at the Lathrop tower.

American Ninja:

That stinks. When you get a chance to swing by the Lathrop site, check to see if there is a new Microwave dish installed on it. My contact said that site was scheduled to get UMTS(3G) last month and receive ethernet backhaul via Microwave in mid-June. That is what the system was telling him but that wouldn't make sense which leads me to believe they won't launch 3G until they have ethernet in place. The good news is ethernet is scheduled very soon and there's a good chance they will launch 3G and HSPA+ at the same time, followed by LTE shortly after. By the end of July, that site along with many others are supposed to have LTE turned up 🙂

It has to be frustrating, but hang in there because the end of the EDGE data network is near!! People who have stuck with AT&T will be glad they did . After they get LTE turned up on all sites with fast HSPA+ to fall back to in fringe areas, activate new towers, and fire up carrier aggregation(spectrum bonding) they will blow Big Red right out of the water.

Edit:    Looking at the pics in a previous post, AT&T was prepping the Lathrop site for Ethernet backhaul via fiber. For them to change to Microwave, that tells me that AT&T is no longer waiting for Frontier and other companies to bring in fiber where AT&T may not legally be able to run their own. This seems to be the case in other areas as well including the Thumb, where Microwave dishes are popping up on several sites. They may in the future run fiber to the Lathrop site, however.

Drove past the Lathrop tower today, nothing new to report.