The 2013 CCA Global Expo starts this Wednesday

[lynyrd65]

 

 

For those who don't know, the Competitive Carriers Association, (formerly the Rural Carriers Association), is a group that consists of carriers allied against the top 2 carriers. It was originally formed to foster cooperation between rural carriers to stay competitive (roaming agreements, licensing synergies, etc). The group having now added T-Mobile, Clearwire and Sprint to its ranks has since changed its name to the current name as Sprint and T-Mobile are decidedly urban focused.

 

The Expo is especially interesting for its keynotes and discussions. Sprint's Bob Azzi spoke at the event last year and let loose a number of interesting slides detailing Sprint's intentions with network vision and spoke of aspirations for LTE roaming with other CCA members. It will be interesting to see if any new progress has been made on that front since the last talk.

 

Last Year's Address with Bob Azzi

 

2012

 

This year's address by Dan Hesse to broadcast live via Youtube on the 17th

 

2013

[Fraydog]

The keynote begins at 8:30 tomorrow. I wonder what Hesse will say...

[lynyrd65]

The keynote begins at 8:30 tomorrow. I wonder what Hesse will say...

 

What I want to be announced

 

Thank you all for attending today's event. At Sprint we're proud to be a part of CCA and having had the opportunity to work together with you all to insure a competitive wireless industry. Today I'd like to talk about our strategy here at Sprint going forward. Today we have an LTE network that is rapidly expanding under our network vision project, currently our network covers over 130 million POPs. We intend to reach 200 million POPs at the end of the year with the rest of the project wrapping up some time in the second half of 2014. We predict our native LTE coverage footprint will have approximate coverage parity with our existing 3G network. As you know we rely on our roaming partners to cover the balance of this map for the voice coverage our customers have come to expect from us. With the industry moving toward VoLTE technologies as the new standard for voice, we are presented with some tough challenges to continue offering the level of coverage of the incumbent CDMA network of today. We worked and continue to work with our partners to meet this expectation. Today's LTE networks have been deployed across a wide range of incompatible frequency bands supported with just as many LTE band classes. Interoperability of LTE networks have become a daunting task. At Sprint we've been working towards solving these issues since the beginning. The LTE band classes that our LTE network supports range across two frequency bands, the PCS G-Block and the SMR band. We could have done exactly what AT&T and Verizon did in establishing proprietary LTE bands but we took a different path. LTE band class 25 and 26 are interoperable with the other PCS bands as well as the popular Cellular band. These two bands are used by almost all of the carriers in the United States today for 3G networks. Many of these carriers have chosen to reuse this spectrum for LTE deployment in the future. We see an opportunity in this space to really work together with our regional affiliates to offer that competitive voice and data coverage our customers have come to expect.

 

Today we are pleased to announce that we have just completed negotiations for reciprocal roaming agreements with C-Spire wireless, US Cellular, and Leap wireless to allow our respective customers access to a large comprehensive VoLTE voice network and a robust LTE data network. We expect customers to be able to access this new nationwide network in Q2 of 2014

 

 

Oh, There's one more thing. We were just kidding when we said SMR LTE services will be offered in 2014. These services are live today with 4x4 MIMO, and carrier aggregation with the PCS band. Also all LTE devices will receive OTA updates to support it tomorrow!

 

What will probably happen

 

 

Thank you all for attending today's event. At Sprint we're proud to be a part of CCA and having had the opportunity to work together with you all to insure a competitive wireless industry. Today I'd like to talk about our strategy here at Sprint going forward. Today we have an LTE network that is rapidly expanding under our network vision project, currently our network covers over 130 million POPs. We intend to reach 200 million POPs at the end of the year with the rest of the project wrapping up some time in the second half of 2014. We predict our native LTE coverage footprint will have approximate coverage parity with our existing 3G network. As you know we rely on our roaming partners to cover the balance of this map for the voice coverage our customers have come to expect from us. With the industry moving toward VoLTE technologies as the new standard for voice, we are presented with some tough challenges to continue offering the level of coverage of the incumbent CDMA network of today. We worked and continue to work with our partners to meet this expectation. We hope to work with other carriers such as those in this room to work towards this goal.

 

Wait, what you want more specifics........

 

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