Sprint on Monday announced that it has doubled the number of markets where its LTE Plus network is live.
The company says the Sprint LTE Plus Network has doubled to cover more than 150 markets, with service now available in twice as many cities. LTE Plus is Sprint’s moniker for its tri-band network, which uses carrier aggregation and antenna beamforming to make use of spectrum in the 800 MHz, 1.9 GHz and 2.5 GHz bands.
Along with the announcement, Sprint is boasting its performance in the Nielsen Mobile Performance (NMP) data, which tracks LTE download speeds as consumers use their devices in day-to-day life. The company says the continual monitoring captures the actual customer experience and works uninterrupted in the background of volunteer panelists’ mobile devices, representing a population of more than 270 million consumers.
Sprint claims an analysis 75 million “download events” measured by the NMP the shows that Sprint beat AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon in download speeds delivered.
In a blog post, Sprint CTO John Saw sought to refute Verizon’s Better Matters campaign, which is based on RootMetrics’ data.
“In their latest racing balls TV ad, [Verizon] chose to use RootMetrics’ state awards rather than the metro awards,” Saw wrote. “At the close of 2H 2015 we won a record 212 first place (outright or shared) metro RootScore Awards for overall, reliability, speed, data, call, or text network performance in 125 metro markets as compared to just 27 awards in the same markets in 1H 2014.”
Saw goes on to argue that while Verizon does hold the most #1 RootScore Awards the race to the best performance is increasingly a tight one.
“Take Houston for example. Here we’re tied for #1 in overall performance, but look closely at the difference between #1 and #4 – the gap is extremely small,” Saw wrote. “Same thing in Austin, Boise, Denver….”
Sprint isn’t the first to refute Verizon’s Better Matters campaign, which includes TV spots use colored balls to depict network performance across the carriers. T-Mobile took issue with the RootMetrics’ results Verizon uses, saying the data is outdated (from the first half of 2015) and didn’t include much of the improvements T-Mobile made to its network in the second half of last year.
You can check out T-Mobile’s annotated Verizon ad below.
