(Reuters) – Sprint Corp said on Wednesday it has demonstrated ultra-fast wireless data speeds of 1 gigabits per second, about 16 times faster than its current peak speeds and rivalling the fastest wireline speeds.
After losing subscribers for years, the No. 3 U.S. mobile service provider, is looking to distinguish itself from rivals AT&T Inc, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile US by wooing customers with an advanced network.
Sprint, which is currently upgrading its network, said that given its spectrum assets, it is “technically feasible” that it could offer speeds as high as 2 gigabits per second. Google Inc boasts 1 gigabit-per-second speeds on a fibre network it built in Kansas City.
Sprint says the fastest speed on its existing network is 60 megabits per second under a service called Sprint Spark, which is currently available in five cities.
Sprint, which announced its plans to investors and reporters at its research laboratory outside San Francisco, said it plans to use the latest technology and airwaves from its buyout of Clearwire Corp to boost its network capacity.
The company said it plans to deploy Sprint Spark in about 100 of America’s largest cities during the next three years. The first markets with limited availability are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Tampa and Miami.
Sprint expects 100 million people in the United States will have Sprint Spark by the end of 2014.
Sprint said that increases to its network capacity should greatly improve the performance of video and other bandwidth-hungry applications and support a new generation of online gaming, virtual reality, advanced cloud services and other applications.
It said that its high-speed service based on Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology will have coverage for a population of 250 million by mid 2014, compared with its 200 million target for the end of 2013.
Investors have been anxious to see what Sprint, which is 80 percent-owned by Japan’s SoftBank Corp, would do to improve its position with SoftBank’s financial backing and the experience of Softbank founder Masayoshi Son, who was able to quickly turn around his company’s mobile business in Japan.
They have also been anxious to hear how much Sprint’s network upgrades would cost. The company said on Wednesday that it would provide capital spending details when it reports fourth-quarter results.
The company, which currently has about 55,000 wireless broadcast towers, said it expects to maintain that number for the next few years, but plans to augment coverage with smaller-scale cheaper network equipment, known as small cells. It plans to start installing small cells in 2014 and to use the technology into 2015 and beyond.
Sprint said the first devices that work on both its own existing spectrum and Clearwire’s spectrum will go on sale in early November from HTC Corp, LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics.
Both Alcatel Lucent and Nokia said they are helping Sprint with its network upgrade.
Earlier in the day, Sprint reported a decline in third-quarter revenue and deeper-than-expected subscriber losses as some customers leave for rival services because of the company’s ongoing network overhaul.
Sprint shares were up 1.3 percent at $6.77 on New York Stock Exchange.
(Reporting by Sinead Carew in Kinsale, Ireland, and Edwin Chan in San Francisco; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)
Sprint demonstrates 1 gigabit wireless data speeds
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