Sprint CEO Gets His Hands Dirty at a Tower Site

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Sprint CEO Michel Combes visited a site upgrade in southern Johnson County, Kansas – not far from Sprint’s Overland Park campus in the Kansas City area. As they talked about the need to upgrade the tower, crew members climbed 130 feet to Sprint’s position on the tower while a rope-and-pulley hoist delivered the new radio to them.  Combes saw the crew do installations on a triband cell site featuring three new 2.5 GHz radios, each with twice the number of transmitters and receivers as the original 2.5 GHz radio.

“This is fantastic,” Combes said. “Congratulations to all of our network teams. It is great to meet some of the hardworking people who work on our infrastructure and physical equipment that bring the Sprint network to life. When we upgrade our cell sites to use all three of our spectrum bands together, customers experience our most reliable service.”

Combes said each band does something special:

  • 800 MHz extends voice and data coverage into more locations than before, including indoors where most wireless traffic is generated.
  • 1.9 GHz is a broad coverage layer. It provides reliable voice and data service across our nationwide network.
  • 2.5 GHz provides customers super-fast data speeds so they can enjoy video streaming and all their favorite apps and services.

“Our goal is to have most of our macro tower sites upgraded to triband by the end of this fiscal year. With the additional 2.5 GHz spectrum being used at this site – and at tens of thousands of sites across the country – we’re also a using a technology called three-carrier aggregation. This bonds together bands of spectrum to essentially create a wider lane that allows more traffic to travel at higher rates.”

Watch the video here.

August 28, 2018