Sprint announced today that it will launch its 4G LTE network in 10 cities by mid-year, including Dallas, Atlanta, Houston, and San Antonio.
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse made the announcement at today's Citigroup Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference.
"It's actually going quite well," Hesse said of the current testing.
"Within the first half of 2012, Sprint customers should experience first-hand the wide-reaching improvements we have made in terms of boosting voice and data quality," Bob Azzi, senior vice president of network at Sprint, said in a statement. "With advanced smartphones and sophisticated wireless modems, our customers are using more and more mobile data, and one of our top priorities is to provide the best technology possible to improve our customers' experience."
The effort is part of Sprint's "Network Vision" strategy, which will deploy multimode base stations across Sprint's U.S. cell sites to boost voice quality, signal density, and data speeds. The first multimode base station was deployed in Branchburg, N.J. in December.
In October, Sprint pledged to launch 15 dual band CDMA/LTE mobile devices, including handsets, tablets, and mobile hotspots, after its 4G LTE rollout.
As PCMag mobile analyst Sascha Segan pointed out last year, Sprint has a 4G WiMAX network operated by the troubled Clearwire, which launched in September 2008. Last month, Sprint agreed to pay Clearwire up to $1.6 billion for access to its WiMAX service through at least 2015, as well as a bridge to LTE services that Clearwire plans to overlay on its network.
"We'd like to work very closely with them to build a bigger footprint," Hesse said today.
The December deal, he said, gave Sprint "price assurance around WiMAX." Clearwire's spectrum holdings also give Sprint a little leeway in terms of network capacity. With its own spectrum holdings, Sprint can operate until at least 2014, but with Clearwire, that extends to 2016, Hesse said.
Sprint thinks of Clearwire's network "almost as a hotspot," Hesse said. "They tended to build in the markets that we will need the most capacity in," so Clearwire is "really a part of Network Vision and our plan."
In August, meanwhile, LightSquared gave Sprint the option to purchase its wholesale LTE network if it ever gets built. But LightSquared is currently bogged down by regulatory inquiries into whether its technology would interfere with GPS devices. Earlier this week, LightSquared said it had secured an additional 30 days from Sprint to secure FCC approval—and hired a chief financial officer who previously oversaw the merger of Sprint and Nextel.
"We think that one of the great advantages of Network Vision [is that it] allows us to do network hosting, which brings additional capacity to the network for us to use," Hesse said when asked about LightSquared.
At this point, Sprint is not investing any more money in LightSquared, but "we hope they're successful in terms of their activities," Hesse said.
Earlier today, rival AT&T officially turned on its high-speed LTE network in the Bay Area and New York City, a geek hotbed that had traditionally criticized AT&T for its poor network coverage.