Sprint Turns Up the Volume on 3G and 4G LTE in Chicago

[flycuban]

Sprint yesterday announced that the company's faster "Spark" LTE upgrades have gone live in Chicago. Last month Sprint announced they'd be combining the company's 800 MHz, 1.9 GHz and 2.5 GHz LTE spectrum to provide what Sprint promises will be real-world downstream speeds of 50-60 Mbps. In an announcement, Sprint now says that these so-called "Spark" upgrades have now gone live in the Chicago area.

 

Sprint intends to use aggregation technology in the 2.5 GHz band to deploy Spark, which will only work on Sprint's lineup of tri-band phones including the HTC One max, LG G2, Samsung Galaxy Mega and Samsung Galaxy S4 mini.

“Sprint’s investment in upgrading our network infrastructure has required a massive team of dedicated engineers and technicians to systematically install new, modern 3G and 4G LTE-capable equipment," said Bob Azzi, Sprint chief network officer.

"This process involved equipping Sprint cell towers in the Chicago area with state-of-the-art network technology. It took us more than a year to complete and, although there have been some service interruptions, we expect our customers will find the improved Sprint wireless experience worth it," said Azzi.

Sprint says they'll deploy Spark in about 100 of the nation's biggest cities in the next three years, with about 100 million Americans having access to Sprint Spark or 2.5 GHz coverage by the end of 2014. The added capacity and speed can't come too soon for Sprint, given they've fallen to last place in most of the major recent LTE network speed and reliability tests.
 

[JonnygATL]

Already covered in a previous post.  It's the one, not surprisingly, about Sprint Spark.  I'm sure this thread will be moved to that one in short order.

[Dkoellerwx]

Just to be clear, 800, 1900 and 2500MHz are not being combined. 

 

Spark speeds are being provided solely by the 2500MHz spectrum.

 

800 and 1900 cannot be combined with 2500MHz. FDD and TDD LTE do not mix.

 

 

Already covered in a previous post.  It's the one, not surprisingly, about Sprint Spark.  I'm sure this thread will be moved to that one in short order.

 

It was a new press release. This can live for now.

[JonnygATL]

Is it not the same Chicago - centric news release embedded toward the last pages of the original sprint spark post?