ericdabbs

Tell them to switch to Sprint Direct Connect. It now has 1x and EVDO PTT so that means great coverage once Sprint launches CDMA on 800 MHz. Less churn the better.

Of course they need to add some coverage. Are you telling me those major cities that I mentioned don't need capacity relief in the downtown metro areas? I am not talking about a small town in Kansas right now nor was I talking about full blown deployment. I am just talking about adding a smaller deployment in the downtown metro areas. Talking about offloading capacity to TD-LTE is kinda useless if some of the major cities that I mentioned do not have the capability to use TD-LTE offloading. Did I not mention that Clearwire is only going to put TD-LTE in only 31 markets nationwide which means there are a ton of major cities that are being left out. Even the Clearwire Wimax network contains 77 markets nationwide. I heard at one point that Sprint and Clearwire have some special agreement where they are targeting high traffic Sprint cell sites nationwide to add TD-LTE capacity that may not be on the Clearwire Wimax footprint but do we really have confirmation on that? I am just saying if Sprint is truly going through with using Clearwire as their sole capacity offloading tool for data traffic relief, don't you think that some of the Wimax cities that were left behind need to equipped to offer that TD-LTE offloading capability?

This is interesting. I wonder why Sprint is giving up on the wifi offload strategy so soon? I think its still a great strategy to have wifi offloading with the sprint optimizer too. I get that Sprint wants to offload excess capacity to Clearwire but I'll be honest with you...with only 5000 sites initially upgraded to TD-LTE by June 2013 and possibly up to 8000 sites upgraded shortly afterwards, I don't think Clearwire has enough of a TD-LTE footprint nationwide to supply Sprint with enough capacity offloading capability that Sprint desires. Even if they filled up all of Clearwire's 16000 Wimax sites with a TD-LTE overlay it would NOT be enough since it still doesn't cover a lot of the major markets. IMO, Clearwire at some point will need to go out and create more small patches in the downtown areas of these bigger markets they missed in the Wimax rollout like San Diego, Phoenix, Detroit, New Orleans, Oklahoma City, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Memphis, Alberquerque, etc to provide capacity relief and would bring in a lot of money to Clearwire. Maybe this won't happen until Sprint buyouts Clearwire but it does need to happen.

LOL. I would like to see how AT&T customers defend these ridiculous AT&T plans. The only differences I see between the AT&T and Verizon shared data plans are that 1) AT&T still has the individual plans which offer the typical a la carte options for voice, data and text at a reasonable price alongside the new shared plans. Verizon on the other hand forces everyone to use the shared data plans which makes individual plans ridiculously expensive. If this is true, this is the biggest difference between Verizon and AT&T. I hate the fact that Verizon kills individual plans with these shared data plans. I would have rather had Verizon just offer these shared data plans to replace the family plans while still offer the individual plans the old way a la carte. 2) No mention of those who are grandfathered into unlimited data on whether they will have to pay full retail price of smartphone to maintain unlimited data on their plan. Verizon has said customers can maintain their unlimited data if they pay full retail price of the smartphone otherwise if they get subsidized smartphone they will have to opt into the new shared data plans.

What you said is true but I think what most people want to hear in the forums is when does Sprint plan to officially release LTE in that market. Of course from reading on this site that there are going to be LTE sites being erected well before mid year 2013. Getting a few LTE sites up and running to play with can be fun if you are a wireless geek but its not really usable. However Sprint could easily block LTE connections until a week before launch just like they did with the 5 initial markets which makes testing useless other than improved 3G. Since no information has been released about potential first LTE sites, I thought it was safe to give an honest answer of at least mid 2013 for market launch.

I think you were fed wrong information. As of right now, St. Louis is still scheduled to be a 3rd round market and the earliest we will probably see St. Louis is mid 2013. Please see this thread for more information on market updates. http://s4gru.com/index.php?/topic/212-network-visionlte-deployment-running-list/

I wish Sprint would continue to thin out more towers. 9700 cell sites are great and all but I would like to see at least half of all iDEN sites to be gone by the end of 2012.

I love your response to the ExtremeTech article.

Don't worry. I am sure Salt Lake City will be a 3rd round market which is slated for a mid to late 2013 release. There are other cities in the same pickle as Salt Lake City like Denver, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Cleveland, Las Vegas, St. Louis, OK City, etc that you could argue that it should have been in the 2nd round. Its just that you can't please everyone and folks will get mad if their market hasn't been chosen yet.

Robert, will the Ft. Wayne/South Bend article be written anytime soon to round out the 2nd round market updates?

Robert has said that the 3rd round markets are still in the planning stages right now and the schedules won't be done until Fall. I have a feeling by October Robert will start getting info about a estimate schedule of the 3rd round markets. If I was a betting man, I would guess that Pittsburgh will be guaranteed to be in the 3rd round. Some other notable cities likely in the 3rd round that I am guessing off the top of my head are Las Vegas, Denver, Salt Lake City, Upper Central Valley, etc. Also Robert has announced border 2nd round cities that are labelled 3rd round like Phoenix, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Oklahoma, St. Louis, Tucson, Tulsa.

Pittsburgh is most likely a 3rd round market which means you probably won't see LTE until mid to late 2013.

Love the video!!! I can't wait to see the new commercials. I wonder if the Sprint marketing team will attack the new Verizon shared everything data plans.

I don't think we will see LTE-Advanced on Sprint until 2014 when Network Vision is complete.

Sprint updated their coverage maps to display LTE coverage. I wonder how often Sprint is going to update these coverage maps for each market since more and more tower sites will be added over time?

magic trick

That is the idea.

Sprint better still be testing LTE in some of these cities because it seems like some of these speeds are pretty atrocious for a empty LTE network. I am hoping to see 10-15 Mbps avg speeds everywhere.

There is no EVDO Rev C coming out soon. By the way Rev C was later renamed to Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) back in Dec 2006. However UMB never took off since Qualcomm in 2008 decided to kill UMB in favor of LTE and started focusing on building chipsets for it. http://www.engadget.com/2006/12/08/ev-do-revision-c-becomes-ultra-mobile-broadband/

I can't see Sprint offering LTE to Virgin or Boost Mobile anytime soon after it just launched its Wimax phone lineup to them. I think another couple years from now after Sprint is finished blanketing LTE nationwide and the Wimax contract is winding down first we can see Sprint offering LTE to Virgin and Boost Mobile and by then there should be enough LTE carriers to accommodate everyone.

Awesome. Now to get the tech blogs buzzing about Sprint LTE and doing speedtests.

Where are you located at?

Thanks for knocking sense into me once again. You are always the voice of reason .

Why is Sprint doing this??? Save the LTE for the postpaid customers.

Yes I agree that AT&T is going to be the main competitor for the PCS H block spectrum. However if the Verizon deal gets approved, Verizon has said it would do the concessions of the Verizon/Tmobile spectrum swap AND sell its 700 MHz A and B blocks. I am sure AT&T is going to gobble up all of the 700 MHz B block spectrum since it coincides with their 700 MHz holdings and the rest like Metro, US Cellular, etc are going to gobble up the 700 MHz A block. If this is true, then the FCC could look at AT&T and say you recently bought up spectrum in the 700 MHz so you should have sufficient spectrum and not allow AT&T to gobble up as much PCS H spectrum as they would have liked. Besides I think that the FCC should also consider whether the carrier that is obtaining the new spectrum is planning to build LTE in that band. It seems like AT&T is focused on trying to deploy LTE on the AWS spectrum so why should they get PCS spectrum? We know that Sprint would use the H block spectrum in the near future if they obtained nationwide licenses.