Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure is watching for RootMetrics’ new network performance report and thinks that T-Mobile is in for a rude awakening when it arrives.
In an interview with CNET’s Roger Cheng, Claure acknowledged the rocky transition period for Sprint’s LTE network but now thinks it’s on track to compete in a meaningful way.
In RootMetrics’ mid-year 2014 network report, Sprint finished last overall performance rankings with a score of 69.6, behind T-Mobile in third with an overall score of 71.5.
Sprint today used its quarterly earnings call to provide an update on its LTE network. The carrier says its LTE network now covers 270 million people, up from 260 million last quarter, and that its 2.5 GHz LTE deployment has jumped from 92 million POPs last quarter to 125 million POPs.
Claure said during today’s call that Sprint is currently working with vendors and manufacturers to get carrier aggregation working between its 2.5 GHz LTE and its 1900 MHz LTE. He said that would allow Sprint to use 1900 for uplink and 2.5 for downlink.
Along with Claure’s expectations of Sprint network improvement, the carrier chief told CNET that new pricing and promotions, possibly including rollover data, are coming as soon as April 2015. He said new plans will be simple and that custom offers will be geared toward reducing subscriber churn. Sprint’s third-quarter churn rose to 2.3 percent.
With 55.9 million total subscribers, Sprint is still the third-largest carrier. But it sounds like Claure is less concerned with Sprint’s rank among its competitors and more with fixing the issues that have plagued the carrier for years.
Part of that includes growing Sprint’s distribution channels, which Claure said during Thursday’s earnings call was third on the list of priorities behind improving the network and creating compelling plans and offers.
Sprint will reportedly boost its retail presence by purchasing storefronts from RadioShack, the apparently doomed electronics retailer.
