Sprint to Aggressively Rollout LTE Over 1900MHz Spectrum Starting Mid-2012 Along With Capable Devices, Network Largely Complete by 2013
Sprint has just announced that they will be rolling out 4G LTE aggressively over their 1900MHz spectrum. I know people were hoping they’d shut down the iDEN network by now to make way for a new 4G network on that 800MHz spectrum but they won’t complete the shutdown until mid-2013 when they’ve been able to migrate all their customers.
We were hoping they’d launch LTE on their 800MHz spectrum but they note that they will use that spectrum for 3G calling in order to improve call performance.
The good news is that Sprint’s already working on this and are working to get things going in mid-2012. And when do they expect it all to end? Mid-2013. That’s a great and very ambitious goal. They expect to cover 260 markets by the end of all this, a lot more than their current WiMax coverage.
And if you’re in a 3G coverage area you can expect to get 4G sooner or later – all of their 3G areas will have 4G by the end of it all. Sprint mentioned they have been working hard on 3G-to-4G handoff technology to make it truly seamless.
It will be a great turnaround compared to WiMax whose rollout has been at a standstill. WiMax from Clearwire still doesn’t cover more than half of American citizens. With LTE, Sprint is able to roll things out at their own pace and there should be no unexpected road bumps as they have already put aside the budget for the rollout.
Alongside 4G LTE, they believe all of the technical and economic changes they’ve made (we won’t get into extreme detail) will help 3G performance. Faster speeds, improved coverage and more are all benefits of this Network Vision upgrade. They say 3G isn’t on the backburner because of LTE, either, as they have committed to 3G long term.
As for other stuff, they’ve confirmed that they will be rolling out WiFi calling support starting this month. Very little devices are supported right now but we know the HTC EVO 3D has that functionality.
So what do you guys think about today’s announcements? All of this is honestly happening way faster than I thought it would. I knew Sprint had a plan for the future but I didn’t think It’d take them just two years to come to fruition. It will be exciting to see how they compete with Verizon who expects their 4G network to be complete by the end of 2013 as well.