Sprint’s Steve Elfman, President of Network Operations, stated yesterday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference that if Sprint decided to go LTE, they could have it p and running with devices in 2012, and coverage over the entire US by the end of 2013. Many think, possibly investors too, that this is what Sprint should jump into since WiMax is on its way out after every other carrier in the US has decided to go 4G/LTE.
Sprint decided to go with WiMax because Intel was heavily supporting it at the time, and Sprint figured, ‘hey, if we get a whole bunch of companies to go in this with us, we’ll rake it in…’ Umm, not. Hence, Clearwire was created and rather than build a strong WiMax customer and client base, they got all high on themselves and started pushing USB sticks.
In a nutshell, it isn’t working out so great, however, Clearwire has already shown that they can push out 90Mbps downstream speeds and 30Mbps Upstream with LTE technology. So…why not Sprint…just do it.
We’re sure to hear more about this from Sprint’s mouths as a more official statement, rather than a leaked part from a speech. Stay tuned!
[via intomobile]