When the other carriers started to make a serious push to roll out LTE, it became clear that Sprint’s WiMax deployment was not the 4G people were looking for. Lets face it — Sprint is likely going to spend the next year playing catch up to Verizon and AT&T. It seems like every week Big Red is announcing another area that they are lighting up with their 4G LTE network. On top of that, both Verizon and AT&T have amassed a cache of LTE enabled phones that are at every price point imaginable. The fight to become a comparable player in the 4G arena is going to be long, and likely filled with marketing jabs from the competition.
Now, clearly falling behind when it comes to releasing a competitive 4G network, Sprint has spoken out about their plans for the future, and how they will compete in the 4G market.
Building the Network
When the US accepted the carriers using “4G” as a marketing term, instead of a term describing a technical specification, things started to get a little out of control. HSPA+, WiMax, and 3GPP LTE networks were able to call themselves 4G and benefit from the marketing (and pricing changes) that occurred thereafter. Unfortunately for the companies that have invested heavily in these technologies, it is going to be expensive to build themselves out to true 4G when the time comes. All that needs to happen is for one company to go first, and be able to hold their head above their competition as having “true 4G”, and the term will shift back to describing a technical spec.
Sprint’s LTE deployment may be coming in a distant third, but their deployment plan is structured to allow for an inexpensive upgrade from the LTE r9 that we know now to the LTE r10 (also called LTE Advanced). The plan, pending approval from the FCC, is to us the 1900Mhz spectrum for LTE r9 on their networks. The towers where LTE r9 has been deployed will also have an 800Mhz broadcast point that can be activated just be dropping a card into the tower. Sprint’s plan as of right now is to offer an LTE service that is competitive to the existing offerings, but as soon as the FCC approves the 800Mhz usage their techs will install the card needed to then start broadcasting LTE-A over the same footprint as the existing LTE networks. Even in testing their network testing when deploying these towers, Sprint is testing both LTE r9 and r10. When the network is active, Sprint will be able to offer significantly faster LTE speeds than their competition, and neither Verizon nor AT&T’s towers are build to adapt as fast as Sprint’s.
For a full explainer on LTE, check out ExtremeTech’s “What is LTE?“
Broadcasting the signal is one thing, but there’s a lot more to deploying a network than the towers. Sprint thoroughly explained how they have re-architected their entire backhaul to support data increases over the next few years. Sprint claims that they backhaul is ready to handle LTE-A (LTE-Advanced) the moment it is turned on. On top of this, their network engineers have spent a lot of time to guarantee a zero-interruption handoff between LTE and 3G. Their staff dedicated to supporting the tower construction and network deployment is about 6,000 employees at the moment according to Sprint.
In a nutshell, it seems like Sprint has paid very close attention to what has happened in the ecosystem so far, and plans for their LTE deployment to be a zero-friction kind of offering that will immediately compete with the rest of the market, as well as be ready to leap frog ahead of everyone else.
How does this affect customers?
Sprint’s deployment plan looks great on paper, but the bottom line is that it is still not here yet. Sprint already has three LTE devices on the market being sold to consumers, but the LTE network still does not have a publicly available launch date. The best we’ve heard so far is “the middle part of this year”. What we do know is that Sprint currently has 700 towers already running, apparently ready to go hot at the flick of a switch, and many thousands more under construction or in various forms of almost ready. On top of this, Sprint plans to have 15 LTE devices rolled out by the end of the year, most of them being smartphones.
There’s also quite a bit that has to happen besides the FCC approval in order for the 800MHz spectrum to be ready for LTE use. That band is currently being used by Sprint for their IDEN users, the push to talk customers that rely on that service. Sprint’s plan has been to move those users onto the software based Sprint Direct Connect, and announced that their users are happy with the change so far. Once every user is off the 800mhz network, the goal is to have LTE-A ready by Late 2013 or Early 2014. Additionally, Sprint plans to continue building out their 3G services, making the network reach further and deliver a stronger 3G service across the US. With a 3G network that is growing alongside their 4G network, the handoff between the two will offer an all around better service for Sprint customers.
Where is Clearwire in all of this? The company responsible for helping Sprint into the WiMax era will also be making the move to LTE, but their interaction with Sprint on a network level would be to act more like the overflow in areas where Sprint’s LTE offering become inundated with users. Clearwire and Sprint will remain partners though the whole process of upgrading to LTE, and will remain partners as the companies move forward to compete in this market.
Final Thoughts
As it stands right now, Sprint’s network deployment plan is by the best out there. The ability to shift to LTE-A in 2013 will be a huge benefit that Sprint will have over wither AT&T or Verizon Wireless. Unfortunately, the network is still dark and there are no real dates attached to when users will actually start to use this network. Even after the network is live, it is difficult to offer a device-by-device comparison for how exactly this new network will keep up with the rest of the crowd.
The next year of network deployment is absolutely critical for Sprint. If their network deployment plans stick, by the time 2013 gets here there will be no question that Verizon and AT&T will have some real competition from Sprint in the LTE world.
