I agree that lower pings are desirable, but AT&T and Verizon's pings are similar to Sprint's. So where are we now? The three other companies' LTE is faster than Sprint's on a bandwidth level, and similar in ping. In fact, many of these test results for Sprint look like 3G speeds, save for the upload speed.
Back to my point, how does current average speed not correlate with future network speed (many more users on LTE wanting more bits)? After all, this is what we're talking about, right? Granted, Sprint's network is probably closer to starting than close to being finished, but I just can't see how the number of users per tower is going to go down in the future. Sprint needs a growth plan to survive, and they may be increasing their number of towers with LTE (admittedly by orders of magnitude) but so will the number of data-hungry LTE smartphones. It looks, to me, like Sprint's network is already getting full.
How, then, do we judge "capacity," (meaning how many users the network can support while maintaining a decent speed) if not for speed? What am I missing?