S4GRU

Puerto Rico falls into Sprint's Puerto Rico/Virgin Islands market. We will be announcing something for PR/VI in the not too distant future. Stay tuned to S4GRU.com!

S4GRU, you know I would love for one of those articles that come out in the next several weeks to be about Central Illinois and specifically Peoria, IL timeframe, if in 2012 at all

You know you will hear it first on S4GRU.com. Stay tuned...

Anything close to or in my small little town of York, Pennsylvania or does it look like I'm gonna have to wait til 2013? We did get Wimax pretty early so I want to have hope that Network Vision will too.

We plan to announce all the cities that will begin deployment in 2012. By deduction, you will then know if you are in a 2013 market. From the data I have, I cannot tell if York is in Sprint's Central Pennsylvania market or the Philadelphia Metro market. It appears pretty close to the transition. But stay tuned to S4GRU.com for the latest.

When is it getting to TULSA!?!?!?!

We will continue to run announcements two to three times per week about cities Sprint will begin to deploy NV in 2012. Stay tuned to S4GRU.com to see if Tulsa pops up in one of those announcements!

Good news if you are willing to wait until the end of the year, but bad news if you are customer like me that has been experiencing terrible service for two months now in the biggest market of all New York City.If a market like Boston will take 7 months to go LTE live, I could image NYC with 1100+ sites , and a lot of crowed buildings. Its not a brained that the big cities like Boston, SF, NY, LA and Chicago will go LTE this year. The question is when. The early Evo adopters like me are coming off contract in June. This will big a big problem for Sprint with no LTE in these cities by that time.

I agree to your points to some extent. But when NV starts deploying, relief will start to occur in the areas where it has been deployed, immediately. It will be a site by site, cluster by cluster deployment. So even though it will likely take 9 to 10 months to complete the NYC market from start to finish, there will be considerable improvement occurring every month along the way. It's possible that the areas where you hang will be one of the first areas. We provided a cluster by cluster deployment schedule on Chicago and we hope to do the same for NYC. Stay tuned to S4GRU.com for the latest.

So when you say 940 sites is that all the cell sites in mass or just in the Boston area? and could you tell me what the CT market covers

In the article above it says that the Boston market largely covers the entire state of Massachusetts. To the north, Sprint has the combined Vermont/New Hampshire/Maine market, to the south there is the Providence and Northern Connecticut market. And to the west there is the Upstate New York East market. In CT, there are two markets, Northern Connecticut and Southern Connecticut. Each market will be announced separately and are subject to different deployment dates.

We are announcing all 2012 markets over the next few weeks. Let's just say that my "Vision" for Phoenix is cloudy over the next several days.

AJ - Great points. I always appreciate your background and perspective.

Eric - Phoenix and San Diego were really shafted in the Clearwire WiMax roll out. Even though PHX and SAN are not going to be in with the very first markets for Sprint LTE, they should be relatively happy about when they are coming online. Although, there are some really ticked off customers in those markets who have already left Sprint, or will in the near future.

AJ:

Excellent points. Verizon has established smarter relationships with it's rural 700MHz LTE partners. Verizon maintains control of the spectrum. Sprint would have to do something more similar to that setup if they ever proceed with alliances in the future.

I believe with Pioneer, they set up an independent company that took control of the spectrum. Is that correct? And then basically that new company had control of the spectrum, and then can ultimately do what it did down the road. I think this has now proven to not be a model way to set up future rural spectrum alliances. But hindsight is always keenly superior, eh?

Robert

I couldn't agree more, Jeff. And it's a model that Verizon has adopted expanding its 700MHz across the land.

Jeff...based on the data I have, you will indeed be waiting.

I would like to know myself, but I haven't seen a map. I just have listings of the 97 Sprint markets with data. I would love to get a hold of one. If anyone out there has a Sprint market map, hook a brother up!!!

- Robert

Sprint Network Vision has not been deployed in Manhattan, yet. Sprint has 1,121 cell sites in the New York City market. It is going to take months and months to overhaul every site to Network Vision standards. Stay tuned to S4GRU.com for the latest on Sprint Network Vision in New York.

SprintNYC...although Network Vision is active in your area, you cannot trust CSR's for the information. We know several Sprint CSR's in these forums and they have not been told anything about when and where Network Vision work is occuring beyond what has been released to the press already.

Stay tuned to S4GRU.com for all the latest Network Vision info. And thanks for joining!

Eric...don't worry. I have info on every single A/L market, including yours. Just pouring through all the data. Will be announcing markets, one at a time.

I'm still working on the Network Vision deployment article. I've not had time in the evenings this week. I'm speaking in a lecture series this week. And my evenings have included much more social interaction with attendees than I was anticipating. I will start to get to a more normal evening schedule tonight. However, I am now thinking I am not going to make my 2PM Friday deadline. I may wait to post late Sunday night as a Monday article. There is a lot of data to go through. The data I have is not a simple list of the 97 Sprint markets in order. That would be too easy. But it does include a lot of good meaty stuff, too.

It will be worth the wait.

Robert

The EBS leases are troublesome. Don't get me wrong, they are a good thing to have and Clearwire has picked them up at very reasonable prices. But they are troublesome as an asset.

Here is the biggest reason why...inconsistency. Clearwire tried to get the leases to go out to 2030. This was a good move. However, many EBS license holders would not go out that far, or were subject to their own internal regulations or local state laws that prohibited such a long lease. So Clearwire is managing hundreds of EBS leases with differing expirations. Some expire as soon as this year.

As AJ points out, Clearwire did put in provisions of renewal and first right of refusal...where it could. But in some places these provisions could not be put in because of, again, the school's insistance, school bylaws or local/state laws.

Here locally, Clearwire leases EBS from the Santa Fe University. I go to church with one of the members of the USFAD Board of Directors. They are one of the early expirations, and they are very unhappy with Clearwire. They feel that Clearwire grossly undervalued the EBS asset in their dealings with them. Clearwire values the spectrum publicly about ten times per megahertz than they were claiming to EBS lessors during negotiations. And then on top of that, they have not built out their network using EBS assets as promised. This has made for a very unhappy lessor. And I believe USFAD will not renew their lease with Clearwire at the same terms, when it comes up for renewal next year. They are hopping mad. I could see them sitting on the asset themselves or even going into a short term lease with a local ISP.

However, also as AJ points out above, if AT&T decided to really organize and go after these EBS leases that are expiring in an aggressive manner, they could pick up some cheap spectrum. It will be much less expensive to subleases EBS spectrum from educational institutions than it will be buying the leases from Clearwire. But I'm not sure if the amounts of spectrum coming from expiring leases is worth the trouble to AT&T. They want big spectrum assets, fast. So this would be a change of course in AT&T's style. But it's something I would consider if I was them.

Although I don't know of very specific instances like this in other parts of the country, I do believe it is common. And about one third of the EBS leases expire between now and 2015. The other third between 2015 and 2030. The final third are out to 2030.

EBS makes Clearwire spectrum assets very unwieldy to manage and a difficult asset to monetize. And with every article that gets published that Clearwire is sitting on a gold mine of spectrum, the more EBS lessors get ticked off.

Robert

We will be releasing more info about the next Network Vision cities later in the week. Stay tuned.

C/U is part of the Central Illinois market for Sprint. There is a lot of work going on in the Sprint Central Illinois market. In the short term there are a lot of backordered T1's that are finally coming in to help until Network Vision backhaul is complete later this year.

The problem with T1's is that they do bring relief when first deployed, but a lot of people who stopped using the network because of poor performance will jump back on quickly and degrade the additional T1's back down.

There is no substitute for fiber and microwave backhaul.

It looks like to me at a glance of Sprint's 97 market list that Madison is located in the Milwaukee Sprint market. Madison will likely get Network Vision/LTE deployment at roughly the same time as MKE.

Delete? Did you accidentally post on the wrong story?

I have a feeling I'm going to be hearing lots of comments, like that!

Yeah just trying to wrap my head around the reasoning for NOT putting LTE on all sites when doing the tests....BUT with NV the LTE is actually "there" just not "turned on" correct? Or are you saying they rolled out the NV tower upgrade there and didn't even include the LTE hardware on those FIT's? If its my first guess then I can see that and them just wanting to do more tests on the 3G network w/o LTE turned on in that area for a little bit. If its the later of what I said then I dunno why they'd do it that way less they are contemplating changing something big hardware wise on the LTE side...no?

When it comes to the Kankakee FIT, I really have no idea. That's why I didn't include the information in the article. I assume that the Kankakee FIT area received all the equipment for LTE when deployed. I would even assume that the LTE is now live on those FIT sites now. I didn't see in the cluster planning schedule at any time Samsung going back to the Kankakee FIT cluster to do more work.

I'm assuming that the Kankakee FIT was 3G only for testing, not 3G only for deployment. Once the FIT testing was complete, I think the LTE was turned on. I would love confirmation though if any Sprint or Samsung employees want to send me a Private Message.

@catpowrd...I have no definitive information about the few areas that have Nextel service, but no Sprint CDMA. I feel that as long as they hold enough PCS spectrum in the area to deploy 1x and EVDO carriers, there is a good chance that they will convert those Nextel towers to Network Vision. You have to hope Sprint wouldn't want to miss opportunities to expand its footprint in easy areas like that.

@ericdabbs...we now have more information about the next Samsung and Alcatel/Lucent cities that will be announced from Sprint. We plan on announcing some of that before them later this week. Stay tuned.

Sarge, unfortunately the source of the documents was not close enough to the situation to know the reasoning behind the FIT's, so I could only go by the information contained in the docs. And they did not disclose any reasoning regarding the FIT's location or scope.

- Robert, S4GRU

Bryan/Tiny, when I discovered the info about the Hammond FIT, I thought of you specifically. I thought you might be pleased. Its a good day to be a Sprint customer in Hammond.

- Robert, S4GRU

I'm with AJ. I don't think that Sprint has actually purchased anything related to LightSquared. At least not any more than their $290M down payment didn't cover. And I'm pretty certain all that just went to engineering and planning.

- Robert

Absolutely they can do this without a merger. In the short term, a merger doesn't make sense. I don't think Dan Hesse wants to stand before the FCC so quickly after pushing so hard against the ATT/Tmo merger.

A partnership like this is a great way to show the FCC that there doesn't need to be any concerns about a future merger. Because a full demonstration of the whole deal will have been shown in advance.

However, even a future merger isn't necessary either.

Next article in series is up. Click on this link.

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.