Sprint continues to insist the company is making headway in delivering users the network they'll actually want to use. Though Sprint has consistently lagged behind AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile in most network performance studies, Sprint Chief Technical Officer John Saw claims in a new statement that the company has seen its network speed performance jump 65% in the last year. Saw based that claim on Ookla's Speedtest data, which suggests Sprint saw an average download speed on its network of 23.9 Mbps last month, up from 14.5 Mbps one year earlier.
Saw credits the deployment of small cell technology like Sprint's
Magic Box, as well as expanded deployment of air poles and strand mounts.
"One of our biggest accomplishments this year has been tackling the small cell challenge," Saw said. "We did this by developing a host of solutions that address the roadblocks that have plagued traditional deployments."
Saw proceeded to promise that the company would continue its efforts to reconfigure all of the company's towers so they support Sprint's three primary spectrum bands: 800 MHz, 1.9 GHz and 2.5 GHz. The company is also promising to bring "thousands" of new cell sites online to expand its overall network footprint. Saw says the company also plans to "aggressively" deploy technologies such as 256 QAM and Massive MIMO, which he claims will dramatically improve speeds in 2018.
"In 2018 you’ll also see us roll-out 256 QAM and 4X4 MIMO nationwide for greater spectral efficiency and faster data speeds," Saw promised. "These critical ingredients will join three-channel carrier aggregation (using 60 MHz of 2.5 GHz), already available today in more than 100 top markets, to form the Sprint recipe for Gigabit Class LTE service."
The problem for Sprint is that the company has been promising that users will love the network that's just around the corner for the better part of the last decade now, so customer trust in such statements is fleeting among all by the most devoted brand enthusiasts. Sprint certainly didn't help this problem by spending most of 2017 chasing down a competition-killing merger, though hopefully 2018 features Sprint refocusing its efforts solely on building a better network.