Sprint may want to rename its “Now Network” to the “Later Is Better Than Never Network” after the carrier’s finance chief pushed back 4G LTE to late 2012. Although the new delay puts the third-place wireless carrier further behind Verizon and AT&T, the new rollout date for the faster network should coincide with Apple’s iPhone 5, expected to use LTE.
The announcement came in a webcast by Sprint’s chief financial officer, Joe Eutenauer. “We believe LTE is the key to our future,” Euteneuer told the UBS webcast interviewer. Earlier this fall, Sprint introduced a new base station that supports both LTE and 3G.
The delay puts Sprint even further behind its rivals’ support of LTE. By the latter part of 2012, Verizon Wireless will have more than two dozen markets where LTE is available. AT&T’s 4G network is available in 15 markets now. Although some fans were disappointed the iPhone 4S unveiled in October did not support LTE, speculation is mounting that the next iPhone, perhaps released in Spring 2012 (but more likely to release in October 2012, will support the faster network. If so, Sprint’s faster network would be right on time — that’s if there are no more delays, like todays.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
3 responses to “Sprint Delays LTE Rollout To Late 2012, Just In Time For iPhone 5”
And surely it will take at least a couple of years to roll out LTE to most markets. So enjoy your Sprint LTE iPhone sometime in 2014! :)
For me, as a Sprint customer, it’s not about blazing speed of the data connection, it’s about the great customer service, having a truely UNLIMITED amount of data allotment, and the costs being kept low. Sprint does this for me, and although I’d like to pay even less than I do, this news about LTE doesn’t mean jack squat to me.
Each time a new iPhone comes out, it’s a slight
improvement over the last. Let’s go down the memory lane and figure out the
people and technology. http://goo.gl/L89ss