If we had a dime for each time Sprint CEO Dan Hesse (or spectrum partner Clearwire) has referred to a possible migration to LTE , we’d have… well, as a minimum several dimes. a brand new rumor that’s popped up from a pair sources today — consulting firm Gerson Lehrman Group and GizmoFusion — claims that the LTE move is now a done deal, with Sprint signing contracts with infrastructure supplies Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, and Samsung to roll out service over the process the subsequent two to 3 years because it decommissions iDEN on its 800MHz spectrum. That said, CDMA isn’t about to leave: the corporate has already committed to upgrading its CDMA footprint with 1X Advanced over the subsequent several years, too. GLG claims that Sprint’s going Lone Ranger in this — it’ll be seeking to partner up with other companies like Clearwire or T-Mobile where it is smart, however the decision to head to LTE up to now has been purely internal.
On a related note, GizmoFusion is claiming that Sprint will start shipping the WiFi-only BlackBerry PlayBook between late March and mid-April in advance of the WiMAX version later this year, together with touchscreen / QWERTY hybrid and whole-touch BlackBerry handsets — either one of which we’ve seen rumored recently . LTE-compatible hardware, assuming it is all legitimate, might be a long way off yet.
[Thanks, Stoopered]
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