Entry posted by S4GRU
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by Robert Herron
Sprint 4G Rollout Updates
Tuesday, July 31, 2012 - 7:35 AM MDT
The final market in our Network Vision/LTE deployment schedule update series is...Fort Wayne/South Bend. This market has yet to be announced by Sprint, and may not be announced until as late as this Fall.
The Sprint Ft. Wayne/South Bend market covers most of Northern Indiana, except for the NW corner which is in the Chicago market. This includes Fort Wayne, South Bend, Mishawaka, Elkhart, Goshen, Marion, Logansport, Warsaw and Plymouth. Sprint's Network Vision OEM Samsung is scheduled to begin mobilizing their subcontractors around the market in November. The first completed Network Vision sites are scheduled to start coming online before the end of that month.
Anticipated Sites Complete at Market Launch. According to the Network Vision schedules that S4GRU has reviewed, if Sprint launched the market in February, 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 Northern Indiana. It is difficult to try to pick a date now this far out, but we have attempted to do that. In looking at the schedule as of today, it would indicate a February market launch (going on a 40% - 50% completion for launch). But there is no way to know if Samsung and their subcontractors will actually hit their schedule dates before deployment in this market begins. We will be able to gauge better after a few months of production is achieved.
Samsung needs to hit a production rate of approximately 25 sites per month to stay on schedule. This is a below normal production rate when compared to other markets. They shouldn't have any schedule issues with the appropriate amount of resources allocated.
S4GRU has examined the schedule in great detail in this market and sees that most of the sites will be complete by April 2013. However, there may be a few sporadic sites that will linger past the completion.
Photo of Fort Wayne 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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