Sprint is America’s third largest operator and one of the few who still uses CDMA technology for voice and data. Several years ago, when it came time to think up a 4G strategy, instead of waiting for the LTE standard to become finalized they decided to back WiMAX. Hindsight is 20/20 and we know now that decision was a dud, but back then Intel was pouring money into WiMAX and even promised that at some point in the future all of their future devices would have the high speed mobile broadband technology baked in. When Sprint decided to roll out WiMAX they didn’t want to go at it alone, so they signed up a bunch of companies to help them create a separate entity called Clearwire. The goal of Clearwire was to create a nationwide 4G network that anyone with a bank account large enough could lease and resell to their customers. The problem was that Clearwire put too much emphasis on their own brand and for some strange reason thought it would be wise to build out a full retail channel selling nothing but USB sticks and such to customers.
Fast forward to today and Clearwire has demonstrated the types of speeds they can achieve if they switched to LTE. Hitting 90 Mbps down and 30 Mbps up is the kind of stuff that dreams are made of, unless you live in Sweden and TeliaSonera is your operator. When asked by investors when/if Clearwire would switch to LTE the company said they’d come to decision by the middle of this year. Yesterday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, Steve Elfman, Sprint’s President of Network Operations said that if they do decide to go with LTE they can rapidly deploy the technology, have devices out on the market in 2012, and that by the end of 2013 they could blanket the entire nation with coverage.
Now we just have to wait for all this to become official. It’s not a matter of if, but when?
[Via: Fierce Wireless]