by Robert Herron
Sprint 4G Rollout Updates
Wednesday, July 11, 2012 - 7:03 AM MDT
The next market in our Network Vision/LTE deployment schedule update series is...Long Island. Which I like to pronounce Lawn Guy-land. But I digress...the Long Island market has yet to be announced by Sprint, and may not be announced until as late as this Fall.
The Sprint Long Island market encompasses Nassau and Suffolk counties. This includes the cities of Hempstead, Levittown, Garden City, West Babylon, Freeport, Hicksville, Valley Stream, Islip, Long Beach, Huntington Station, Massapequa, Happaugue, the Hamptons and Montauk. Sprint's Network Vision OEM Alcatel/Lucent is scheduled to begin mobilizing their subcontractors around the market in November. The first completed Network Vision sites are scheduled to start coming online in December.
Anticipated Sites Complete at Market Launch. According to the Network Vision schedules that S4GRU has reviewed, if Sprint launched the market in May, these are the anticipated sites that would likely have LTE complete at that time. This would provide fairly good LTE coverage over many parts of the market.
Schedule details and the bottom line
Sprint has not yet selected a date to formally "launch" LTE service in Long Island. It is difficult to try to pick a date now this far out, but we will try. In looking at the schedule as of today, it would indicate a May market launch (going on a 40% - 50% completion for launch). But there is no way to know if AlcaLu and their subcontractors will actually hit their schedule dates this early in the deployment for this market. We will be able to gauge better after a few months of production.
Alcatel/Lucent needs to hit a production rate of only 25 sites per month to stay on schedule. This is a pretty low amount compared to many markets. There is no reason why they should not be able to complete the market on time, and there is a good chance that they may even be able to get ahead of schedule.
S4GRU has examined the schedule in great detail in this market and sees that most of the sites will be complete by September 2013. However, there may be a few sporadic sites that will linger past the completion.
Photo of Long Island provided courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
NOTE: S4GRU Sponsor Members can track regular updates of
Network Vision sites completed nationwide. Completed sites are shown in an interactive Google Maps interface. Information about sponsorship can be found here: S4GRU Sponsorship
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