[Networking] monkeychef:
Hello everyone,

Today was a very big day if you are on or thinking about making the move over to Sprint. Today, they announced their plans for their future LTE network and how they plan to move forward over the next few years.

The first thing to discuss is Wimax. Wimax is a good technology, but the problem is that both Clearwire and Sprint deployed it very poorly. First of all, it was deployed on a very high spectrum, making it difficult to penetrate through buildings and travel long distances, while not degrading in signal strength. The other thing about the current Wimax deployment is that (and I have noticed this personally) switching from tower to tower over Wimax is very poorly done. What I mean by this is that switching from tower to tower doesn't work like it would if I were to use 3G.

Wimax was, however, a great investment. Wimax gave Sprint a great partnership with Clearwire, and it also gave Sprint the the title of the first 4G network(not that the title really matters anymore). I feel that Sprint knew they were going to at some point make the switch to LTE, which is why they used Wimax instead of LTE. It turns out that it is pretty easy to convert a Wimax tower to an LTE tower, its just a few hardware and software changed and you are ready to go.

Now its time to get down to the exciting stuff, the conversion over to LTE. Sprint plans to deploy its LTE network by the middle of 2012 using its current Wimax network (which will be converted over to LTE), Lightsquared's new LTE network (assuming it goes through the FCC), and most importantly, Nextel's IDEN network. I say that IDEN is the most important because of two things; the first being that the network is already of decent size, so there would be a good signal in much of the country, the second being that the IDEN network runs a lower part of the wireless spectrum, allowing the signal to reach farther distances and penetrate buildings. All three of these solutions will expand Sprint's network effectively and quickly, and give many people in America 4G.

As far as devices go, Sprint will be releasing 15 LTE equipped devices in 2012 (the first phones will be strictly 1900Mhz which will be Sprint's 4G), and will continue to sell Wimax devices throughout 2012. This is a smart move, as I believe that completely dropping Wimax support would cause a sort of uprising among Sprint customers. If Sprint turns off its Wimax network at the end of 2012, they should allow any customers that still have a Wimax phone to upgrade to a new LTE phone, thereby honoring their promise of unlimited 4G.

The price of this new network is not cheap. Currently, Sprint believes it will spend around $10 billion to create this new LTE network. They also believe that they will be saving about $17 billion within the next 5-6 years because they will be fading out their IDEN network (which currently costs $4 billion a year to run). Note that this number is much higher than wall street analysts had expected, but Sprint is going to do what it has to do.

So what is the end result? I believe that if all goes smoothly, the LTE rollout will go quickly and Sprint will have a thriving LTE network by the middle of 2013, and at that point it will cover most major cities in America as well as the more populated suburbs. However, if this transition does not go well, I feel that this could be the end of Sprint. Sprint is spending a lot of money these days ($10 billion on a new network over 3 years, $30 billion on Iphones over the next 4 years) and I am sure investors are a bit wary of the overall situation.

I have very high hopes for Sprint, and I hope that they rollout their new network successfully and quickly, so that everyone can experience the true speed and power of 4G LTE on the (in my opinion, maybe not yours) best wireless network in the nation.

PS: If you read all of this, thank you.