Network Vision: Sprint’s path to domination

Network Vision: Sprint’s path to domination
Over the last year, Sprint has constantly touted its Network Vision upgrade as the way forward for the company to compete effectively against the likes of AT&T and Verizon Wireless, as well as T-Mobile USA and other smaller carriers.

Over the last year, Sprint has constantly touted its Network Vision upgrade as the way forward for the company to compete effectively against the likes of AT&T and Verizon Wireless, as well as T-Mobile USA and other smaller carriers. But what is Network Vision? How does it affect Sprint subscribers? Is it the silver bullet that Sprint portrays it to be?

History

Before we dive into answering those questions, a little history on Network Vision is in order. The history will help put into perspective why Sprint is even doing this, and why it believes it will save them. The concept of Network Vision begins with Sprint-Nextel Corporation, at the beginning of 2010. It had just had yet another successful year selling its 4G WiMAX phones, but it had trouble keeping up with all the networks it runs.

Over the last two years, Sprint has suffered considerably over the maintenance of its iDEN, CDMA2000, and WiMAX networks. Network performance on the CDMA side has been consistently falling over the last two years. Analysts and various stakeholders in Sprint-Nextel have been pressuring the company to eliminate the Nextel iDEN platform and migrate subscribers to the Sprint CDMA platform after badly managing the integration of the Nextel platform following the merger in 2005. Finally, nearly everyone has ragged on Sprint for its choice in using Clearwire’s WiMAX for its 4G platform after Verizon Wireless and AT&T announced that they would use LTEback in 2008. Never mind that if Clearwire and Sprint had not deployed WiMAX, then Clearwire would have lost the licenses to the TDD 2.5GHz spectrum that WiMAX resides on due to the build-out requirements described in the licenses.

Since 2008, Sprint has consistently made known its desire to simplify its network architecture and offer a unified platform that is cheaper to maintain and offers the same quality of service that Sprint has always offered. In December 2010, Sprint announced that it had begun a radical new projectto rebuild its entire network, called Network Vision. The announcement of Network Vision came shortly after Verizon Wireless launched its 4G LTE network in October 2010.

Initially, Sprint announced that Network Vision would just be a replacement of the separate infrastructures for the 2G (iDEN), 3G (CDMA2000), and 4G (WiMAX) networks. The idea was to use new multi-mode network infrastructure that could handle all three different network technologies. While iDEN would remain separate, CDMA2000 and WiMAX would live on the same infrastructure. iDEN would then be phased out after Network Vision build-out completed in favor of a push-to-talk solution over CDMA2000.

When queried about the lack of LTEin the original Network Vision infrastructure design, Sprint noted that it could easily run any network technology it wanted with the new Network Vision equipment. Sprint also mentioned that it can easily migrate to LTE from WiMAX because they are both very similar at the tower level, so it can reuse most of the equipment at the tower for LTE.

In October 2011, Sprint made a new announcement about Network Vision. It had revised its plans after securing a deal to offer the iPhone to its subscribers. The new Network Vision project is far more ambitious than the original one. WiMAX was dropped from the architecture of Network Vision. Instead, Sprint would deploy LTE on its exclusive nationwide PCS G-block spectrum. It would also shut down iDEN while deploying Network Vision, with iDEN spectrum eventually being used for a second LTE channel to bond with the G-block PCS LTE network.

Next page: But what is Network Vision?

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