Working with Nokia, Sprint is planning massive MIMO field trials in race to gigabit LTE.

BARCELONA, Spain – Sprint, along with vendor partner Nokia, made a splash at Mobile World Congress this week with a massive multiple-input/multiple-output antenna demonstration that pushed multigigabit speeds over an LTE network. But, news aside, Sprint CTO John Saw and COO of Technology Günther Ottendorfer – seemingly the least stressed guy in Barcelona, Spain this week – mixed it up with reporters to add a bit of personality to the announcement.

Ottendorfer, rocking a pair of Sprint yellow Nikes emblazoned with “LTE” on one side, “Plus” on the other, tried out a few analogies to explain the concept of massive MIMO, which, in this case, refers to an 128-antenna array in a 64-transmit/64-receive configuration.

“You have 128 ears to listen,” he said. “You used to have one ear – 128 ears in a sector where there are probably eight or 16 users at the same time.” Ottendorfer took another swing with, “It’s like you have 128, how you call the things, megaphones,” he said. “The theoretical concept of these antennas has been around for a long time but the computing power wasn’t there.”

“We are very happy that we have so much spectrum that we can grow into that spectrum and massive MIMO is one of the things that will help us,” Ottendorfer added. In this case, the goal is to deploy using Sprint’s 2.5 GHz spectrum assets, which he said provide good quality and coverage. “To really make it work in a mobile environment, you really need 2.5 GHz.”

Saw explained Sprint installed 2.5 GHz Nokia base stations in 2014, which have been upgraded on the road to gigabit LTE.

“This is part of a journey,” Saw said. “The theme … for Sprint in the next few days is going to be all about gigabit LTE, leveraging the deep spectrum position.”

Saw said spectrum is key “in an unlimited services environment” and that upcoming massive MIMO deployments will serve as “a stepping stone to a gigabit LTE experience. Massive MIMO is what we call a 5G technology, but we need that to drive toward gigabit LTE.”

Also germane to the gigabit LTE and “5G” discussion, both Sprint execs discussed the larger trend of distributed architecture, which, at a high-level pushes equipment closer to the end user.

“We look at speed as a proxy for capacity,” Saw said. “It’s not just so much dropping higher speeds, there’s also an improvement in the physical layer. You need to look at the improvement in the core network as well. You’re talking about things like [mobile edge computing].”

Ottendorfer echoed that, and looked back at the evolution of telecom networks.

“Philosophically, it’s very interesting how the telecom industry came from a distributed” architecture, “then it became very centralized. And now, we’re pushing the computing back to the edge. TD-LTE is well suited for that.”