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Sprint announces Kansas City and Baltimore to Network Vision & LTE launches for first half of 2012

S4GRU

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blog-0991749001328711828.jpgby Robert Herron

Sprint 4G Rollout Updates

Wednesday, February 8, 2012 - 6:08 AM MST

 

Today in a Sprint Q4 2011 Conference Call, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse announced Kansas City and Baltimore as receiving Network Vision overhauls (including LTE deployment) in Mid 2012. Most of the conference call was focused on financial reporting, and more specifically how the iPhone impacted financials. This is something Wall Street has been clamoring for since Sprint announced it was getting the iPhone back in October.

 

Sprint announced highlights of impressive financial performance improvements. Sprint is far from making money, given it lost $1.3 Billion in the quarter. But this could be the quarter where it all started to turn. Sprint added 1.6 Million new subscribers. The most adds for them in one quarter in over six years. But on the negative side, Sprint only added 161,000 post paid subscribers. Well short of the 294,000 expected. And Wall Street will surely punish them for this dark cloud on their sunny horizons.

 

Sprint 4G Rollout Updates announced back on December 12th that Kansas City would be one of the first cities in Network Vision, after it was mentioned by a Senior Sprint Network Manager. So we were not surprised by the KC news today. However, Baltimore has never been mentioned in regards to Network Vision and LTE deployment until today. It's not a shocking move as Baltimore has always seen a lot of Sprint love in the past. It was one of the first cities to get WiMax deployment as well.

 

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Sprint Baltimore market. Includes all of Central and Eastern Maryland, except for the suburbs immediately adjacent to Washington, D.C. Click on image to enlarge.

 

 

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Sprint Kansas market. Includes all Sprint's native sites in the State of Kansas, and most of Western Missouri including Kansas City. Click on image to enlarge.

 

After this news, this brings the full list of announced cities from Sprint for Network Vision and LTE deployment to six. Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, San Antonio, Kansas City and Baltimore. Sprint has announced that there will be 10 cities for the first half of 2012. That leaves four more to be announced. It cannot be too much farther in the future. Next month, the first half of 2012 will be half over!

 

And S4GRU announced last week that Chicago's Network Vision and LTE deployment is well under way, also. This deployment is surely going to be the fastest and most thorough deployment in Sprint history. And it needs to be!

 

Other details noted:

  • 1.8 Million iPhone activations, of which 40% are new customers
  • Sprint posts net loss of $1.3 billion, adds 1.6M subscribers in Q4-2011
  • ARPU improved to $3.69, the best ever improvement in American wireless history
  • Sprint now up to 55 Million total subscribers
  • Best churn rate ever reported
  • 9,600 Nextel iDEN sites offline and decommisioned by the end of 2012

The best Tweet I saw of the Sprint call was from Sascha Segan from PCMag.com, see below:

 

Twitter: @saschasegan

 

Sprint's quarterly results show once again how iPhone is a way to transfer $ from carriers to Apple.

 

Thanks, Sascha. I needed that after such a boring snoozefest of a call!

 

And thanks to all the S4GRU members who joined us for the live chat during the call on our website. That was fun! Even if the call was boring...

 

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Updated at 7:15 AM MST and 8:13 AM MDT.

 

EDITED 3/5/2012: To include market maps.

 

Source: http://newsroom.spri...article_id=2180

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8 Comments

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ericdabbs

I was a bit disappointed in the lack of Network Vision questions during the Q&A session in this conference call. I know the conference call is geared towards the analysts who only care about the financials but it would have been nice if some of them would ask some Network Vision questions.

 

Hopefully the 2012 Q1 conference call would share more color on how Network Vision is doing.

 

I am very curious to find out what these last 4 LTE markets are. It seems like all the initial LTE markets are in the midwest to east coast markets. I hope the west coast gets some loving with the last 4 LTE markets.

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S4GRU

@ericdabbs

 

I was disappointed in the call, in the fact that we were missing lots of geeky details. As for announced cities, almost all have been Ericsson cities, except for Baltimore (which is A/L). So there must be several more A/L and Samsung cities to be announced for NV/LTE deployment for 1st half of 2012. I think we must have heard all the Ericsson cities by now.

 

I think Sprint is trying to play the, under promise, over deliver card.

 

 

 

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S4GRU

@autoprime

 

Stay tuned. Lots more A/L cities to be announced. Although I think that Phoenix and San Diego are going to be some of the early A/L cities.

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ericdabbs

@autoprimeStay tuned. Lots more A/L cities to be announced. Although I think that Phoenix and San Diego are going to be some of the early A/L cities.

 

Yeah I hope so. I know a lot of Phoenix and San Diego folks have been clamoring about the lack of 4G support even though they are one of the bigger markets in the US. I am hoping that there are truly 22 markets by mid year and that only the Ericsson cities have been announced. Both A/L and Samsung have been quiet on their NV markets. The only Samsung city that is being worked on that I have heard is Chicago.

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S4GRU

I've also heard about St. Cloud, MN and NE Iowa for Samsung. But none of their stuff has been announced, formally.

 

I remember Dan Hesse saying that they will announce cities once they are 90 days out. Maybe that's why there is a delay in A/L and Samsung cities. Those cities are farther out, but have started now.

 

It just looks like Ericsson got a head start with NV. Since Ericsson manages Sprint's network already, they may have a leg up in understanding how things work on the network and thus were able to get out the gate ahead of Samsung and A/L.

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leerage

Robert, this may have been asked but when this says for Kansas City, is this only the Kansas City area to get LTE or are all the yellow cell sites set to receive LTE on the map?

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S4GRU

Robert, this may have been asked but when this says for Kansas City, is this only the Kansas City area to get LTE or are all the yellow cell sites set to receive LTE on the map?

 

All the yellow dots are centered in a Network Vision/LTE site. The yellow area around it shows a crude approximation of coverage. But in a place like Kansas, it would actually be quite a bit further.

 

Robert

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