_YetIdigress

From Main Street in Munhall, PA today (Approximately 40.39769, -79.90158)

Pittsburgh is a Samsung market who is one of the more aggressive vendors for Sprint. Typically, they tend to bring up 4G LTE first as there are no other LTE 1900 signal to coordinate unlike EVDO 1900 which has to be turned on in clusters. Sprints deployment is a shotgun pattern where crews will go to wherever a site is ready to be worked on instead of waiting to work on a certain area. As rural sites are easier to get permitting and backhaul, typically crews begin there. As time passes by and more urban sites are ready, they'll transition from the rural sites into the urban areas.

 

Depending on the red tape from the local government, site owner, and backhaul provider, Samsung gets everything up and going 30-45 days after they begin (if backhaul is available). For a city the size of Pittsburgh and the amount of sites in it, in addition to Samsungs aggressiveness, I'll say around end of summer for a good portion of the city being covered. 

Wow, thanks for the informative reply!

I'm a recent Sprint subscriber, just switched from T-Mobile last week. Long story short, I didn't do my research and am so far disappointed by Sprint's data coverage (or lack thereof) in the Pittsburgh area. On another note, however, I was glad to find through reading this thread/checking out coverage maps on sensorly, that Sprint is beginning to unofficially roll out 4G LTE in the area.

 have a question that someone with more knowledge or experience regarding past Sprint LGE Rollouts may be able to answer; what type of timeframe are we talking about when we look at the few blips of 4G that have been popping up, until a city/metro area of our size is substantially covered? End of the summer? End of the year? Early next year?