[EVO 4G General] kickingandscreaming:
I am sorry, what?

Let me rephrase that. Sprint needs to pay the bills, which is about 10 billion dollars in debt due in the next three years. To upgrade wimax to lte, or launch lte on the same towers as wimax, would cost 6 billion dollars. Where are they going to get the money. Verizon could not afford 16 billion dollars in 3 years in upgrades and rollout, how is making no money sprint going to do that?

Wimax is superior to lte in every which way. Every speed test, using the same equipment, wimax is about 20% faster. But here is the problem, the same equipment. A crappy build out is a crappy build out. You can not just change the software and have it magically work.

What everyone that states, what you are stating, is this. You have a 25 year old computer, you install a magical software on this machine and it can beat anything released in 2011 and 2012. You are stating exactly that, that sucky hardware with good software, is somehow going to fix things.

Is your coverage going to increase with lte, no they are using the same hardware and frequency. Is the speeds going to increase with lte, no they are using the same hardware and frequency. Will it cost sprint billions of dollars to launch a product that will deliver the same results as wimax, yes it will.

You can not take a ford focus, install a new firmware on it and make it a bmw, it will be just a ford focus painted a different color and with a different firmware, same pratical speeds, same problems.

As for the folks that love to use the spectrum frequency argument. Yes the high frequency has a tendency to fade with buildings. Just like the lower frequency fades with electrical signals. When you deploy the network the fade between the two is about the same. Radio towers and tv tower really kill lte.

But the big difference between lte and wimax frequencies is tower placement. You can literally sit 150 wimax towers right on top of each other allowing 20mhz signal to tens of thousands of people. When you stack the towers, do to the higher frequency, you get zero interference. With lte, you need to keep each tower at least 3 mile from each other and over lap has to be zero or each tower will interfere with each other, offering service to hundreds of people.

Wimax is better for urban deployments, lte is better for rural, at the contained frequency.

Lastly, lte has to use 1 set of frequency for down load and one set for upload. Wimax and download and upload on the same frequency at the same time, thanks to the higher frequency.

When it gets down to it, frequency means you build out the network differently, each having its own plus and minus. Each are needed to do a full build out. Which is why verizon and att are using the 1900mhz spectrum to build out lte in some places.

But as for sprint going to lte and suddenly all the problems are fix, that is just a fallacy. You can not make a computer run faster with software then it physically can run. Sprint built out a crappy network in which the vast majority of it sucks. Changing the software will not improve the network, in fact it will only make it worst. As for the change, wimax is open source and cost about 1/10th the amount of lte. You can build out 10 wimax stations for every 1 of lte. Sprint has not turned profit in the last few years and has a massive amount of debt coming due in the future.

They would not only have to pay the debt, pay for clear, but also spend 6 billion dollars more to add lte. 16 billion is just not doable.