By Dr. John Saw, Chief Technology Officer, Sprint



RootMetrics has just kicked off testing for the second half of the year, and its first market out of the gate is a big win for Sprint. Today we’re excited to tell customers in Denver that Sprint now has the absolute fastest network, beating out the competition in network speed and grabbing a tie for 1st in overall, reliability, data and text network performance.1



We have our 2.5GHz spectrum in Denver to thank for our strong showing, as well as the beginnings of our two-channel carrier aggregation deployment, resulting in our first outright speed win in this market.



Similarly, RCR Wireless last week covered RootMetrics’ Kauffman Stadium report showing Sprint now has the #1 network at the Royals’ home venue in Kansas City where we’re also fully running two-channel carrier aggregation on 2.5GHz.



It’s exciting to see the power of our 2.5GHz spectrum start coming to fruition. With approximately 120MHz of 2.5GHz spectrum in 90 of the top 100 largest cities, it’s no secret that we have a ton of capacity to meet the growing data demands of our customers. Today we’re taking advantage of our 2.5GHz spectrum by rolling out two-channel carrier aggregation on select sites in 80 markets across the country. Cell sites with the capability are delivering double the capacity and speed in markets like Denver. And you ain’t seen nothing yet. Our engineers are already working on three-channel carrier aggregation which will deliver even higher capacities and speeds, just when the competitors’ networks are starting to congest.



We aim to build a very competitive and capacity-rich network by densifying and increasing our number of cell sites across our 2.5GHz, 1.9GHz and 800MHz spectrum bands. This will include adding thousands of new macro sites to increase coverage, as well as expanding our 2.5GHz LTE footprint. In addition, we’ll deploy tens of thousands of small cells using 2.5GHz, allowing us to add capacity in targeted high-traffic areas, as well as provide better service in hard to reach locations.



So why should customers care about technical terms such as 2.5GHz or concepts like capacity? Simple. Our 2.5GHz spectrum excels at moving huge volumes of data at very high speeds, and because of our large 2.5GHz spectrum holdings, we can continue to meet our customers’ appetites for bandwidth intensive applications. Well into the future we expect our network will only get better as we increase our capacity for mobile data. We’re encouraged by today’s results in Denver, and we’ll keep pushing hard to deliver the same kind of outstanding network experience in markets across the country.

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1Rankings based on RootMetrics Denver (August 2015) RootScore Report for mobile performance as tested on best available plans and devices on 4 mobile networks across all available network types. The RootMetrics award is not an endorsement of Sprint. Your results may vary. See www.rootmetrics.com for details.

