By Mike Hennigan, Regional Vice President, Network



We’re excited to report that our project to upgrade the Sprint network in San Juan, Puerto Rico, is well underway and customers are now benefitting from faster data speeds as we light up new 2.5GHz cell sites throughout the city.



Our 2.5GHz spectrum is uniquely suited for delivering large amounts of data at very high speeds. And we’re proud to be one of the first operators in the world to roll out two key functionalities of LTE Advanced – carrier aggregation and antenna beamforming – on our new 2.5GHz cell sites.



Carrier aggregation technology bonds together bands of spectrum to create a wider data highway, allowing more traffic to travel at higher rates. We’re seeing that a 2.5GHz cell site with carrier aggregation can deliver peak wireless speeds in excess of 100Mbps on capable devices, including some of the hottest phones on the markets such as the iPhone 6s, Samsung Galaxy S6, HTC One M9, LG G4 and more.



Antenna beamforming is a signal processing technique that directs signals from multiple antennas towards where our customers are. Simply stated, while our competitors are sending LTE data meant for a specific customer to everyone in a sector, we are able to transmit more directive beams to exactly where our customers are located. As shown in the chart below, the combination of carrier aggregation and beamforming will give our San Juan customers a much improved throughput experience, especially at the cell edges and indoors.





Today approximately 32 percent of the upgrade is complete and we expect to have 2.5GHz service fully lit up across the city by early summer. We’re excited to provide our customers in San Juan with a capacity-rich network that’s built to meet their wireless data demands both now and into the future. Patricia Eaves, our sales director and general manager for Sprint in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, says her team is more energized and eager to serve customers than ever before. With our improved network and competitive rate plans, it’s a great time to give Sprint a try.





