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Clarification on Reported New Sprint 4G LTE Cities

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by Robert Herron
Sprint 4G Rollout Updates
Tuesday, April 17, 2012 - 12:29 PM MDT


Yesterday, the site TechnoBuffalo.com ran a story about the possibility of discovering more Network Vision and LTE markets that appeared to them to be on the horizon. It was also picked up by several major tech sites, including CNET and The Verge. Since I have seen the document in question before, and I know what it is that we are looking at, I thought I would explain clearly what you are seeing.

First, let me start out by saying this is not a Sprint market list, and not a list of cities getting Network Vision upgrades or LTE coverage. That is not what this document is about. This is a schedule of Sprint 4G LTE DDC's, or 4G Cores. They are essentially 4G LTE data centers.

Every 4G LTE site is connected to a specific Sprint LTE data center via backhaul. This is where the data is processed and put out into the internet. Sprint has approximately 20 of these 4G cores around the country. And each of their 38,000 LTE sites is/will be connected to one. For those of you who are familiar with CDMA switch centers, this is a similar concept managing 4G LTE data. These DDC's need to be in place before the LTE sites that are connected to them will be able to operate on the network.

I'm sorry to rain on anyone's parade, if you are excited that your city may be getting LTE sooner than you thought. But our deployment list still stands. However, if you are interested in knowing about the dates of these 4G LTE DDC's, then the image below from TechnoBuffalo.com is legit. These are real dates regarding real LTE data centers. S4GRU does not publish these types of images to protect our sources.

We were contacted about this information from another leading tech site and were able to vet the information for them. I am happy to do that for anyone needing to verify any source documents in the future. Confidentially, of course.

 

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Image from TechnoBuffalo.com's article

 

Reference: TechnoBuffalo, CNET, GottaBeMobile, The Verge

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blemas

So what DOES this mean for cities mentioned in the picture? My city is right next to Akron, Ohio and I am curious about the odds of us getting lit up with LTE service. I am an original EVO owner and I am now eligible for my 2yr upgrade. Since I am still waiting on WIMAX, I am a bit skeptical on LTE rollout promises. Still love the phone, service and plan that Sprint provides, I would just like to be part of the 'in crowd' with the next generation of 4G! Any insight would be appreciated.

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S4GRU

So what DOES this mean for cities mentioned in the picture? My city is right next to Akron, Ohio and I am curious about the odds of us getting lit up with LTE service. I am an original EVO owner and I am now eligible for my 2yr upgrade. Since I am still waiting on WIMAX, I am a bit skeptical on LTE rollout promises. Still love the phone, service and plan that Sprint provides, I would just like to be part of the 'in crowd' with the next generation of 4G! Any insight would be appreciated.

 

Akron is in Sprint's Cleveland market. We have written an article about where the Cleveland market currently is in Sprint's Network Vision schedule: http://s4gru.com/index.php?/blog/1/entry-153-are-milwaukee-and-cleveland-making-a-run-on-the-sprint-network-visionlte-deployment-schedule/

 

Akron will get a full LTE deployment as part of Network Vision upgrades. This will likely occur in the first half of 2013. WiMax deployment was never planned to go nationwide. And the problems with WiMax deployment stalling was because Sprint was using a 3rd party (Clearwire) that ran into severe financial problems.

 

This time with LTE, Sprint is deploying it themselves. And they are planning to deploy it nationwide. Sprint has to upgrade every site to its new Network Vision standards and will upgrade each site to LTE while they are there. This deployment is night and day different than how WiMax went down.

 

Robert

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