Sprint on Thursday reiterated its commitment to embracing the next generation of wireless connectivity, having also welcomed the 3GPP’s approval of the first standalone 5G New Radio specification made at its 80th plenary meeting held earlier this week in La Jolla, California. The Overland Park, Kansas-based mobile service provider said it’s been actively involved in the latest 5G research and development endeavors, adding that it’s planning on continuing those efforts going forward. Sprint’s near-term 5G plans are focused on limited commercial deployment in the first half of 2019, with the firm targeting New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Kansas City, Houston, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C. with its premier buildouts.
Sprint Chief Technology Officer John Saw called the completion of the first 5G NR standalone specification “a tremendous accomplishment,” reiterating his belief that the next wireless revolution will benefit not just the technology industry but humanity as a whole. The telecom giant’s first 5G network will leverage its vast 2.5GHz holdings and be based on the 3GGP’s non-standalone NR specification, meaning it will rely on existing 4G LTE infrastructure which Sprint will modify to allow for higher data speeds and capacities, as well as lower latencies.
The company’s long-term 5G bet is to combine with T-Mobile and join its spectrum portfolio with the Bellevue, Washington-based firm’s 600MHz spectrum, presumably through carrier aggregation, thus delivering a solution that’s both significantly better than 4G LTE in terms of overall performance but also relatively straightforward to deploy. Sprint and T-Mobile’ merger valued at $26.5 billion is presently being reviewed by a number of U.S. regulators and while both parties already said they’re hoping the approval will come in the first half of 2019, most analysts believe that timeline is too optimistic. In the meantime, T-Mobile and Sprint continue to pursue their own 5G projects, thus risking redundant buildouts should their proposed consolidation end up being greenlit.