Sprint says new tech bolsters network speeds, coverage

Edward C. Baig | USA TODAY

NEW YORK—Sprint has been aggressively trying to alter wide-held perceptions that its network lags other carriers—it has built an advertising campaign around the fact that its network reliability is within 1% of Verizon’s.

On Tuesday, Sprint unveiled new technology that promises to take the nation’s fourth largest carrier well on the way towards superior next generation “5G” network coverage (though full deployment of 5G is still going to take awhile).

The tech is called High Performance User Equipment, HPUE for short, a geeky moniker that the company claims will bolster its high band 2.5 GHz spectrum coverage by up to 30%, including indoors where the company says most wireless traffic is generated.

“The knock on high-band spectrum has been propagation and reach,” says John Saw, Sprint’s chief technology officer. “But at the same time we also know that high band spectrum is the future for the industry (and 5G.)”

Saw says the limiting link for strong coverage is typically the uplink, that is the connection from your handset back up to the base station. “If we can improve that link it means that you can stretch coverage out even further,” he says. That’s the promise behind HPUE.

Sprint announced HPUE at a press conference heavy on industry jargon. For example, Sprint is pressing ahead on other geeky-sounding technologies that promise faster and more reliable coverage, including what’s known as multiple carrier aggregation and Massive MIMO.

The carrier co-led the development of HPUE, which Sprint says has been embraced as an industry standard. Sprint’s majority owner SoftBank, as well as Qualcomm, Samsung, ZTE, Broadcom, MediaTek, Skyworks Solutions, Alcatel, Motorola, LG and Qorvo are all part of the HPUE ecosystem.

Sprint plans the initial network rollout of HPUE in 2017 in the company’s 250 LTE Plus markets. As “modem-level” technology, you will need a new phone to exploit HPUE.

Samsung is expected to bring out at least one of those new flagship phones in 2017. Alcatel, LG, ZTE and Motorola are other companies that Sprint says are planning to deliver HPUE-capable devices.

No word yet on if or when a future iPhone might also take advantage of HPUE, though Sprint did say other unnamed companies are involved.

Separately, at its press event, Sprint demonstrated how a soon-to-arrive software update can push download speeds on an iPhone 7 or Samsung Galaxy S7 past 200 Mbps.

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter