Sprint, which serves nearly 60 million connections in the U.S., together with partners Qualcomm Technologies and Motorola Mobility, a Lenovo company, have announced the debut of what they claims is the first U.S. deployment of Gigabit-class LTE on a commercial network using a forthcoming flagship smartphone.
The new gigabit class LTE service from Sprint employs three-channel carrier aggregation (CA) and 60 MHz of 2.5 GHz spectrum in combination with 4 x 4 MIMO and 256QAM higher order modulation technology to deliver Category 16 LTE download data speeds on a TDD network.
As part of the launch, Motorola showcased the high-bandwidth capability of its forthcoming smartphone that is based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 mobile platform with an integrated Snapdragon X16 LTE modem to enable support for gigabit LTE capability.
Sprint stated that it plans to utilise its 2.5 GHz spectrum to offer gigabit LTE service in high-traffic locations across the U.S. as part of its strategy to provide a foundation for 5G by ‘densifying’ its network via the addition of small cells and smart antennas. The strategy is intended to enable Sprint to offer 5G-like services with gigabit-level performance over its LTE Plus network and to meet future demand for mobile broadband services.
Sprint claims that with 204 MHz of spectrum in the U.S. and more than 160 MHz of 2.5 GHz spectrum in the top 100 markets nationwide, it holds more licensed spectrum capacity to support gigabit-class LTE than any other U.S. carrier. In addition, it noted that licensed spectrum enables a more reliable and higher quality service for LTE Plus customers through not relying on unlicensed resources.
The roll-out of Sprint’s gigabit class LTE over the LTE Plus network will require a series of incremental upgrades, starting with three-channel CA, which is currently available in over 100 markets. The next stage will be implementation of Category 16 devices enabling support for 4 x 4 MIMO and 256QAM.
Sprint also plans to utilise Massive MIMO, a key element of 5G, to further enhance capacity and coverage for its 2.5 GHz TDD-LTE spectrum. Leveraging massive MIMO radios using 64T64R, Sprint expects to be able to increase capacity to beyond the 1 Gbit/s rate and deliver capacity of 3 to 6 Gbit/s per sector.
Sprint noted that working with Ericsson, at MWC 2017 it demonstrated 1 Gbit/s performance over 60 MHz of 2.5 GHz spectrum, while in collaboration with Nokia it demonstrated how massive MIMO can be used to increase cell capacity up to 8x compared to 4G LTE using 2.5 GHz TDD-LTE spectrum with 64T64R.
