And Verizon is shutting down their CDMA network at the end of the year. It's an old technology that is being sunsetted. The problem with Sprint is that they are still relying on it for far too much (and they don't have broad enough spectrum holdings to make dual networks work well).
Additionally, a lot of Sprint's rural coverage relies on Verizon CDMA roaming -- which will be going away as Verizon sunsets their network.
>The problem with Sprint is that they are still relying on it for far too much (and they don't have broad enough spectrum holdings to make dual networks work well)."
Sprint has a crazy amount of 2.5GHZ spectrum holdings. They are already deploying that with Massive MIMO to move everything to LTE Advanced.
> Sprint has a crazy amount of 2.5GHZ spectrum holdings.
Which gets stopped by walls and wet leaves. It's great if you're in line of sight of a tower and own a device that supports HPUA (high-powered uplink).
If both aren't true your experience will be less than optimal as the phone will have to fall back to band 25 and band 26 LTE which still isn't being provisioned on 15mhz or 20mhz. This means the fallback frequencies will congest easier. In most markets because Sprint either lacks the spectrum to go wideband or needs to use it for legacy CDMA2k since they only support voLTE on like 4 high-end phone models.....
>"Which gets stopped by walls and wet leaves. It's great if you're in line of sight of a tower and own a device that supports HPUA (high-powered uplink)."
Which is why they are combining it with their 800MHZ spectrum from the old Nextel iDEN service. 800MHZ can pretty much punch through anything.
They do not use carrier aggregation between band 25/26 and 41.
There is not enough spectrum to run band 26 on more than 5mhz in most markets. This means it is slow and congests easily. The rest is used to support CDMA2k clients. As the parent post said, they don't have enough spectrum to run a proper dual network.
The stopgap solution at this time is to get a Magicbox[1] from sprint that will grab band 41 signals from outside and relay it as a new tower on band 25 or 26. Then the phone will just fall back onto 1X for calls.
Additionally, a lot of Sprint's rural coverage relies on Verizon CDMA roaming -- which will be going away as Verizon sunsets their network.