Everything seems to be on track for Sprint to roll out its LTE service, a service that will cost somewhere north of $715.5 million. The Now Network announced earlier this week that it has built its first cluster of multi-modal base stations that are LTE-ready.
The cluster of base stations were planted in Kankakee, Illinois, and follows the single multi-modal base station put up in Branchburg, N.J. These stations are powerful enough to run the forthcoming LTE-based network in the Kankakee area, but no such traffic is passing through at the moment.
Discussing the company’s improvement in its network, Bob Azzi, SVP at Sprint said:
“Sprint’s on an aggressive path to roll out Network Vision, and in collaboration with our partners, have already achieved many significant milestones that offer improved customer experience on the Sprint 3G network, and we expect to maintain and even accelerate this momentum in 2012.”
Sprint also states that rolling out these 3G upgrades help its service because it eliminates most technical risks that may hamper its plans of validating rapid LTE deployment. Speaking as a Sprint customer, it’ll be interesting to see how the company navigates between the roll out of its forthcoming LTE, and the upkeep of its older 4G service — WiMax.
[Sprint]