Sprint Nextel briefed investors Friday concerning the carrier's aggressive plans to begin operating a new high-speed wireless 
LTE network in selected markets across the United States beginning in mid-2012. The supporting architecture is designed to accommodate all the traffic from the carrier's 3G , 4G and Direct Connect customers on new multimode base stations being built by partners Samsung, Alcatel Lucent and Ericsson.
"We have a single network architecture that we are taking advantage of to deliver all [wireless] capabilities to our customers on a single, flexible platform," said Sprint Senior Vice President Bob Azzi.
The hardware consolidation effort is expected to enable Sprint to dramatically reduce the number of cell sites it requires nationwide from more than 60,000 right now. "Work on 22,000 cell sites is currently under way [and] the balance will be started in the next few months," Azzi said.
The switch to multimode base stations is also expected to reduce power consumption costs as well as significantly cut the carrier's greenhouse gas emissions, Sprint said.
Ramping Rapidly
There are two key attributes of Sprint's next generation Network Vision platform, said Steve Elfman, president of network operations and wholesale at Sprint.
One is "having a multimode network platform that enables multiple technologies and spectrum to be deployed on a common platform at a lower cost structure," Elfman said. The other is having "an integrated device chipset that enables devices to function on multi-spectrum bands and multimode technologies."
Sprint has been working with Qualcomm and other partners to ensure that CDMA-LTE devices are available by the middle of next year. Approximately 15 Sprint devices are expected to hit the market throughout 2012, including handsets, tablets and data cards.
What's more, Sprint now envisions a far more rapid LTE deployment scenario than when the carrier initially introduced Network Vision in the fourth quarter of last year. "We are building as we are speaking and we expect to be largely complete by the end of 2013," Elfman said.
By then Sprint projects that its LTE network will be within range of 250 million people. Overall, however, the carrier has a very aggressive rollout schedule to maintain, said Gartner Research Vice President Phillip Redman. (continued...)
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