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

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.