Cricket parent Leap Wireless said it is on track to launch a trial run of its 4G LTE network by the end of the year, which Fierce Wireless said will be in Tucson, Arizona.

Within two to three years, Leap said it will cover two-thirds of its current network footprint with LTE. That includes 25 million points of presence (POPs), or Internet access points, in 2012, Leap said in an third quarter earnings report.

LTE-based smartphones from Leap are not expected until mid-to-late 2012, Leap CEO Doug Hutcheson told Fierce Wireless.

One of Leap's biggest rivals, MetroPCS, launched the nation's first LTE service last year and began offering relatively cheap, prepaid 4G voice and data plans without any LTE phones out of the gate. But as my colleagues discovered in PCMag's Fastest Mobile Networks 2011 survey, MetroPCS's LTE network crawls compared to Verizon's 4G LTE, and runs more like a "fast 3G" network.

In its earnings report, Leap said it added 665,939 new customers last quarter with a net gain of 9,511 customers, compared to a loss of 199,949 the year before. It generated $763.3 million in revenue, up 20 percent from the year before. Within the last year Leap subsidiary Cricket launched its first smartphones, and the company has shifted resources to adding smartphone customers over its usual broadband customers.

In March, a month after Leap first announced plans to launch an LTE network, Leap signed a service agreement with LightSquared, pending the latter's approval from the FCC, to deploy its terrestrial LTE network. At a conference last month, LightSquared said it aims to have its retail partners selling phones in the second half of next year, and will cover 260 million Americans with 4G LTE by the end of 2014.