Sprint Provides Quarterly Update On Its Next-gen Network Build - Quick Facts

(RTTNews) - While reporting its first-quarter financial results today, Sprint Corp. (S) Chief Technology Officer Dr. John Saw also provided a quarterly update on the company's Next-Gen Network build in a blog.

In the blog post, Shaw said that Sprint has upgraded thousands of macro sites to give customers the best network experience using all three of the company's spectrum bands.

Sprint has also expanded 2.5 GHz to nearly two-thirds of its macro sites, up from about half of the sites covered just a few quarters ago. In addition, the company has deployed about 7,000 strand mount 2.5 GHz small cells on cable infrastructure in the first quarter.

Sprint has distributed more than 65,000 2.5 GHz Sprint Magic Boxes to improve indoor data speeds on average by 200 percent.

Further, Sprint said it is working to launch mobile 5G in the first half of 2019. According to the company, its Massive MIMO technology is capable of delivering up to 10 times the capacity of current LTE systems, significantly increasing data speeds for more customers in high-traffic locations.

Sprint noted that as it has so much 2.5 GHz spectrum, it can use Massive MIMO to deliver 4G LTE and 5G on the same radio simultaneously.