There’s an exciting buzz around Atlanta these days as the city prepares for professional football’s biggest event in February. We’re thrilled to be part of the action. Our team is prepping the Sprint network in Atlanta for the Big Game, and we’re laying the groundwork for something even bigger! That’s because Atlanta is one of the first markets where we’ll launch Sprint 5G — the next generation of wireless service — in the first half of next year.

In preparation for these efforts, we’ve spent millions of dollars over the last two years building out our Next-Gen Network to help meet customers’ demand for high-bandwidth applications and unlimited data in time for the arrival of fans and spectators.

In Atlanta, as we have been doing across the country, we’re unleashing our rich spectrum holdings, along with innovative and traditional technologies to dramatically increase the coverage, reliability and speed for our customers. Our focus includes:

Upgrading hundreds existing metro Atlanta cell sites to use our three bands of spectrum – 800 MHz, 1.9 GHz and 2.5 GHz – so customers get our fastest, most reliable service.

Installing hundreds of small cells on infrastructure like telephone poles and streetlights to help “fill in” areas of the network with our super-fast 2.5 GHz spectrum, for a bigger, faster data highway.

Deploying 5G Massive MIMO technology today to increase LTE capacity up to 10 times, giving more customers faster data speeds in high-traffic locations like downtown and around the stadium. With a software upgrade next year, this technology will be the foundation of Sprint’s mobile 5G service.

The work we’ve already completed has provided the foundation for Sprint’s LTE Advanced capabilities, now available nationwide and delivering up to 2x faster speeds on capable devices. It also helped us make Atlanta one of 225 cities where we’re offering incredible gigabit class LTE performance for customers on capable devices.

As a result of these efforts, we’ve made significant speed improvements in Atlanta and now rank second in average download speeds there according to latest Nielsen data.[1] With all the work we’re doing in Atlanta, customers there can expect continued network performance improvements in the months ahead.