Sprint Finally Joins 4G LTE Wireless Race

alphadogg writes "Sprint, which has been building up its LTE smartphone lineup this year, Monday finally turned on a 4G LTE network in 15 cities to support those devices. Sprint, which is entering the LTE network race well behind AT&T and Verizon, has initially launched 4G LTE in cities across Georgia, Texas, Missouri and Kansas. Sprint says it will add markets throughout the rest of 2012 and expects to have largely completed its 4G LTE build-out by the end of 2013 (along with enhanced 3G coverage) to address the wireless voice and data needs of 250 million people across the United States. Sprint has some major catching up to do on the 4G LTE network rollout front, though the fact that LTE adoption by customers has been slow at least gives the carrier a bit of breathing room. LTE network demand is expected to surge later this year, assuming Apple rolls out an iPhone 5 with LTE support."

Comments

Re:False advertising

[GeneralSecretary]

Sprint has WiMax which they call 4G, so this is not their first 4G network.

What about coverage?

[von_rick]

They could roll out as many new technologies they want, but with Sprint it is hard to actually get the coverage and speeds they promise. Unlimited 4G data plans are meaningless if your phones keeps showing the "No service" symbol whenever you are indoors.

Re:What about coverage?

[amicusNYCL]

Unlimited 4G data plans are meaningless if your phones keeps showing the "No service" symbol whenever you are indoors.

Or outdoors. I bought my Evo 4G in, what, 2009? They told me that 4G service was coming to Phoenix "soon". The only time I ever use 4G with Sprint is if I go to Las Vegas. Sprint can take their 4G "network" and blow it out their ass. At this point if I stay with Sprint I'll look forward to being able to use a 4G LTE network sometime in mid 2025.

Re:What about coverage?

[Lothsahn]

How about an airave or a cellular repeater? Sounds like you'd be an ideal candidate for one...

http://www.wilsonelectronics.com/

Network Vision

[GeneralSecretary]

This is part of Sprint's interesting Network Vision project, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zp_jpIdr_uw This allows them to have each tower support all their various networks and should be extendable for future technologies.

All four major carriers now support LTE

[toejam13]

At this point, all four major carriers now support LTE. So the next question is: will we start to see handsets that cover the entire LTE frequency smorgasbord that is used within North America?

Current LTE:
Band 04 : 1710-1755 UL / 2110-2155 DL - AT&T, T-Mobile, MetroPCS
Band 12 : 0699-0716 UL / 0729-0746 DL - Verizon, US Cellular
Band 13 : 0777-0787 UL / 0746-0756 DL - Verizon
Band 17 : 0704-0716 UL / 0734-0746 DL - AT&T
Band 25 : 1850-1915 UL / 1930-1995 DL - Sprint
Band 26 : 0814-0849 UL / 0859-0894 DL - Sprint

Future LTE:
Band 02 : 1850-1910 UL / 1930-1990 DL - currently being used for HSPA+ by AT&T and T-Mobile
Band 41: 2496-2690 TDD - currently being used for WiMax by Clearwire for Sprint

Except it doesn't matter

[elashish14]

Because Sprint has had Wimax since the beginning (longer than any other company has had 4G^H^H 3.5G). The only reason they're changing over is that they're pretty much the only ones that have adopted Wimax instead of LTE. Wimax is still gonna be supported by Sprint into 2014 - there's really no rush to change over.

And honestly, there's really no difference between Wimax and LTE either outside of the fact that more people started adopting LTE after Sprint started building up their Wimax network. It's not like the speeds are worlds apart in the way that '4G' is an improvement over 3G. LTE is a little bit faster than Wimax, but the difference will be totally inconsequential.

So for that, shame on whoever wrote the title.

Re:Except it doesn't matter

[shaitand]

Which would be fine if new 4g phones supported wimax and if sprint had any wimax coverage. But the wimax coverage is just as crappy as this new 4g lte coverage and overlaps it.

You'd think they'd build 4g lte in at least the major cities where they don't have 4g coverage so that there would be 4g options for most places. As it stands they've spent what is no doubt a great deal of investment capital to bring 4g coverage to those who already have it! If anyone really wanted 4g in these places they are probably already locked in a 4g contract so there won't likely be much revenue coming from this one.

How many bloody G's are there?

[Narrowband]

At some point, you'd think it might be more cost effective for the handset manufacturers to start using some form of software defined radio to allow handsets to switch between different bands. Or at least some sort of FPGA solution reprogrammable by something like a firmware update. I suppose there might be some antenna inefficiency as you start switching away from what your antenna is tuned for, but I'm not sure how much.

Re:How many bloody G's are there?

[TooMuchToDo]

Software defined radios are used at towers, because power is cheap and plentiful (vs a portable device).

Eventually, a chip manufacturer will start building a radio that does the whole swath of LTE. It's just going to be a bit. Remember, LTE still hasn't been around anywhere near as long as CDMA or GSM.

Re:How many bloody G's are there?

[tsotha]

The biggest problem with LTE for handsets is power. Frequency translations in software are the last thing you want to do if you're worried about battery life.

Re:How many bloody G's are there?

[YoopDaDum]

A handset radio subsystem is made of three parts: 1) the modem baseband, doing the digital processing, 2) the RF, pushing the signal between baseband to/from the final RF frequency and 3) the RF front-end (RFFE), doing the filtering and possibly low noise amplification in the reception direction, and power amplification (PA) in the transmit direction.

Now every time multi-bands support comes up, someone says "SDR" as the magic solution. But SDR applies to the modem baseband part only, and is actually quite common in many existing LTE devices. And it's irrelevant to this issue: the baseband, even if hardware centric, has no problem supporting any bands. Same for most recent RF chips: they're also multibands already.

The issue is the RF front-end: those filters are specific to a given bands. You want more bands? You need more filters (and possibly switches, unless the RF chips has enough separate ports) and this add cost and space on the PCB. And then there are the PAs. For now the wider the PA, the lower its efficiency (and even "wide" PA do not cover all bands, just a few 100s MHz at most). Low efficiency means higher battery consumption and higher heat (which degrades the efficiency too). There's a solution coming hopefully soon for PAs, called envelope tracking (ET). It should enable both efficient and wideband PAs. For filters, I haven't heard of any reasonably sized and cheap programmable filters with proper performance. That's the bottleneck for now. I someone can crack this nut, there's a big market to gain.

Re:How many bloody G's are there?

[tlhIngan]

Now every time multi-bands support comes up, someone says "SDR" as the magic solution. But SDR applies to the modem baseband part only, and is actually quite common in many existing LTE devices. And it's irrelevant to this issue: the baseband, even if hardware centric, has no problem supporting any bands. Same for most recent RF chips: they're also multibands already.

Actually, SDRs are capable of receiving up to around 125MHz or so, and transmitting over 600MHz - you can get 250MS/s ADCs and 1.2GU/s (for ADCs, it's samples, and DACs it's updates) DACs. With a bit of careful clocking, you can easily gang 4 or more of them to get an effective 1GS/s ADC (up to 500MHz by Nyquist).

Nowhere near cellphone frequencies, and we're talking about ADCs that cost over $150 in 1000 lot quantities (the DAC is somewhat cheaper, being only around $50 or so in 1000 lots).

Direct-conversion SDRs consisting of only a low-noise preamp (Rx) and power amp (Tx) are not only in the realm of possibility, they're becoming available (FlexRadio 6000 series is a direct-conversion SDR - it has an FPGA to accellerate the digital downconversion (mixing) and can do 4 of them per ADC, and does direct conversion transmit as well. They call it digital at the antenna.).

But yeah, SDRs aren't a magic bullet - there's still tons of RF work - even a direct conversion SDR requires an RF frontend (a situation unlikely to change as super-sensitive ADCs are an even more niche product than a high-bandwidth ADC). But the baseband part is rapidly becoming obsolete.

Re:Far behind AT&T?

[fnj]

That's really encouraging that Sprint is not too far behind the worst carrier in the history of the world .

Sprint 4G LTE...

[nighthawk243]

Sprint: "Hey guys, we've picked up 4G... you should now have ISDN equivalent speeds instead of 56K-esque you had with our 3G!". Maybe I'm just bitter because of all the remote desktop sessions I have to do over those slow Sprint air cards. Just marginally more usable with LANDesk than 56K.

Too late

[SCHecklerX]

I already left sprint for Straight Talk. $45/month with a Palm Pre 3 and 4G.