Sprint today detailed its wireless network plans for the next 15 months. During its quarterly earnings call with media, Sprint said that it is on track to cover 200 million POPs with LTE on its 1900MHz spectrum by the end of the year. Its 1900MHz LTE network will be finalized by mid-2014. At the same time, Sprint has already begun to deploy LTE in the former Nextel's 800MHz band, which it is repurposing for 4G. Sprint did not say where it is lighting up 800MHz LTE, nor when it expects to complete its 800MHz LTE network upgrades. The bigger picture concerns Sprint's 2.5GHz spectrum. Sprint plans to have 5,000 2.5GHz TD-LTE cell sites up and running by the end of 2013, and it will accelerate its 2.5GHz build-out during 2014. Sprint hopes to cover 100 million POPs with 2.5GHz LTE by the end of 2014. Sprint says it expects to see significant speed boosts in markets served by the 2.5GHz spectrum. On unloaded test sites, Sprint is seeing download speeds in the 50-60Mbps range. Moving forward, most Sprint devices will support LTE in the 800MHz, 1900MHz, and 2.5GHz bands. By way of comparison, Verizon's LTE network covers more than 300 million POPs; AT&T's will cover 270 million POPs by the end of the year; and T-Mobile's covers 202 million POPs.


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