Sprint Magic Box is making big strides. Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve deployed more than 80,000 Sprint Magic Boxes to businesses and consumers in approximately 200 cities across the country, making this one of the largest small cell deployments in the U.S.

We’re also happy to report that supply has caught up with demand. When we launched Sprint Magic Box in May, we saw much higher customer demand than anticipated. Airspan Networks has stepped up production to keep the pipeline of product moving, and we expect to soon reach the milestone of more than 100,000 units deployed. Looking further out, we plan to deploy more than 1 million Sprint Magic Boxes as part of our multi-year roadmap.

Sprint Magic Box is the world’s first all-wireless small cell. The great thing about this product is that we can simultaneously improve the customer experience while accelerating the densification of our network. This indoor, self-configuring LTE small cell is free to qualifying customers to use and requires zero permitting, implementation, labor, or rental costs. The customer simply places the unit near a window and plugs it into a power outlet – no router, wired backhaul, or Wi-Fi required. Within minutes hard-to-reach indoor coverage holes are eliminated, and customer’s data speeds improve on average by more than 200 percent.1 In the example below, average download speeds improved anywhere from 110 percent to 650 percent inside a large office building following the installation of Sprint Magic Box.

Today about a third of our Sprint Magic Box customers are businesses, and we’ve seen particularly strong demand in big box retail stores, hotels, restaurants, commercial office buildings, and schools.

With a broad toolkit of small cell and other solutions, we’re making great progress improving service for our customers as we densify our network. This year our network toolbox delivered a 60% year-over-year increase in Sprint’s national average download speed according to Ookla Speedtest Intelligence data.1 We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, and Sprint Magic Box will continue to play a significant role this year as we kick our network build into high gear.

— John

1 Signal and speeds based on optimal conditions for most Sprint devices.

2 Average download speed increase based on Ookla’s analysis of Speedtest Intelligence data comparing Dec. 2016 to Dec. 2017 for all mobile results.