Sprint CEO Dan Hesse this morning confirmed that Sprint's a little further behind on LTE than they had hoped to be at this point. "We are behind our original objectives with Network Vision," stated Hesse on a conference call with press and analysts. On the same call, Sprint President of Network Operations Steve Elfman stated the company's plan to deploy LTE on 800MHz has been bumped up to the fourth quarter of this year. Sprint expects to have 200 million potential customers covered with LTE by year's end.

Tammy Parker over at Fierce Wireless directs my attention to some internal correspondence leaked by Sprint that suggests things should start speeding up soon. Sprint's been adding about 10 new (mostly small) markets a month with their build, but according to an internal Sprint Q&A with Sprint's Chad Elliott posted by S4GRU, Sprint is picking up the pace as they deal with some of the associated headaches of tower upgrades. That alone is not surprising, but the document highlights some of the headaches Sprint has faced:Sprint currently offers LTE in parts of 58 markets, but has begun deployment in more than 450 cities. About 170 additional markets are arriving in the "coming months," insists Sprint. Sprint's big problem right now (if you're a Sprint user with a shiny LTE device you're incapable of using) is they keep focusing on tiny markets, and promised major league markets like New York keep failing to materialize.

Sprint keeps saying these major markets are arriving in the "coming months," but according to Sprint employees, "coming months" in Sprint's lexicon actually means half a year.