Another technology for Sprint's souvenir collection
Sprint in now in the unique, yet bizarre, position of simultaneously juggling four of the world's main wide area wireless technologies
Published: 26 October, 2011
READ MORE: Sprint Nextel Corporation | LTE
The task of keeping up to speed with the various wireless technology flavours Sprint is currently supporting was made more challenging with its announced support for LTE-Advanced, an evolution of the LTE standard.
Sprint had originally said its LTE build-out would start in mid-2012 and take three to five years to complete. But in an analyst call earlier this month, Steve Elfman, President of Network Operations, described a more ambitious LTE rollout that would be mostly complete by the end of 2013, exclaiming, "We're building as we're speaking." Deployment is taking place using the number three carrier's 1900 MHz spectrum, and will cover 250 million people by the end of 2013. The first LTE smartphones are expected to go live on the network in mid-2012.
Now, Sprint has again upped the ante. Speaking at the 4G World conference in Chicago, Sprint VP of Network Development and Engineering, Iyad Taraz, said the carrier will upgrade to LTE-Advanced in the first half of 2013, leveraging the carrier's 800 MHz band that will be freed up as Sprint winds down its iDEN service.
Sprint in now in the unique, yet bizarre, position of simultaneously juggling four of the world's main wide area wireless technologies - iDEN, CDMA, WiMAX and LTE. If that isn't bad enough, it is also involved in a complex set of network sharing agreements with Clearwire and LightSquared.
This patchwork of different technologies and disparate wholesale agreements is the result of Sprint's early, and aggressive, support for WiMAX back in 2008. With the benefit of hindsight is can be argued that had Sprint simply waited just one more year before committing to a 4G strategy, the writing would have been on the wall for WiMAX and Sprint would have almost certainly instead embraced LTE, saving itself from the predicament it now finds itself in.
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