Last week was a pretty big week for the underdogs in the US wireless industry. T-Mobile introduced UNcarrier 2.0 and Sprint acquired Clearwire and Softbank became majority owner of Sprint. Sprint has owned Clearwire for quite a while, well they’ve owned the majority of the company. Now they are 100% owner of the company and looking to use their spectrum to expand their LTE offerings, which is pretty far behind.
Sprint is using the 1900MHz spectrum as their primarily spectrum, they are adding the 800MHz from their recently shutdown iDEN network and now adding the 2.5GHz spectrum from Clearwire to help out even more. As most of you probably know, the 2.5GHz spectrum isn’t too good for building penetration, but Sprint is planning on using that spectrum in densely populated cities to support the use of 800MHz, which is really good at building penetration.
Currently Sprint doesn’t have any devices that can take advantage of the new frequencies. But Sprint did announce today that they have 3 new MiFi’s and data sticks that will support all three bands. The 800MHz, 1900MHz and 2.5GHz. That is the Netgear Zing Mobile Hotspot, Netgear 341U USB stick and the MiFi 500 LTE. All of these will be available starting July 19th, which is this Friday.
We’re hoping that this will help Sprint proceed with their LTE rollout, as they are quickly falling behind. Verizon has just about covered their entire 3G footprint with LTE, AT&T isn’t far behind, and T-Mobile started after Sprint and has no passed them up. Sprint also needs more bandwidth as their network is pretty saturated. We’ve seen reports of some LTE markets getting speeds of what 3G should have been. Let’s hope that Softbank can help improve Sprint’s network.
How many of you on Sprint are excited about their LTE network? How are the speeds in your area? Let us know in the comments below.