Sprint's Network Vision initiative

[503ducati]

What is Sprint's 'Network Vision' ?

http://newsroom.sprint.com/press_kit...presskit_id=19

Network Vision, originally announced in December 2010, is Sprint’s plan to consolidate multiple network technologies into one seamless network with the goal of increasing efficiency and enhancing network coverage, call quality and data speeds for customers across the United States.

On Oct. 7, 2011, Sprint announced its plans to accelerate deployment of Network Vision and its plans to roll out 4G LTE on its 1.9 GHz licensed spectrum. Sprint expects the rapid deployment to reach 250 million people by the end of 2013.


Dan Hesse, Sprint CEO
“Our progress deploying Network Vision enables Sprint to extend and evolve our 4G leadership and to improve the experience for 3G customers. Our next-generation network and cutting-edge device lineup, combined with the industry’s best pricing plans, give Sprint customers the best experience in wireless.”


Current vs. New cell site

Today, Sprint uses separate equipment to deploy services on 800 MHz and 1.9 GHz spectrum. Through Network Vision Sprint will install new network equipment and software that brings together multiple spectrum bands, or airwaves, on a single, multimode base station. The new equipment makes it easy to accommodate additional spectrum bands.





With Network Vision, Sprint will make substantial changes to the cell sites that power its wireless network. The top image shows Sprint’s existing base stations, which require single, refrigerator-sized cabinets for each technology. Large black coaxial cables must run from each cabinet to the top of the cell tower, which has an inherent loss of signal. The Network Vision multi-mode base station will require less space. Other advantages will include the ability for Sprint to use spectrum bands on multiple technologies, replacing coaxial cables with fiber that is not affected by signal loss and improved remote radio heads that replace existing less efficient radios.


Multi-mode technology


The implementation of multimode technology throughout the Sprint network will:
• Enhance service
• Create network flexibility
• Reduce operating costs
• Improve environmental sustainability

· Berge Ayvazian, Senior Consultant, Heavy Reading
“This is a very bold move. Sprint was first with an all-digital wireless network; the first to upgrade to EVDO; and more recently, the first to broadly offer 4G services. Sprint is once again first to deploy a common converged mobile network that will strengthen its 3G services; enhance its 4G technology options; and continue delivering the industry’s leading push-to-talk offering.” -- December, 2010

Network Vision Progress: Sprint and its Network Vision partners, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Samsung are executing detailed deployment plans, with deployment of 22,000 cell sites currently underway and many technical milestones achieved.

Roll-out of LTE on 1.9 GHz spectrum: Sprint will extend its 4G leadership position in the U.S. by adding LTE technology to enhance its current 4G offerings, with plans to launch LTE on its existing 1.9 GHz spectrum by mid-year of 2012. Sprint expects its 4G coverage footprint to cover 250 million people when the build-out is completed by the end of 2013.

Sprint Direct Connect: On October 2, 2011 Sprint launched Sprint Direct Connect, the next generation of push-to-talk service with broadband data capabilities. Operating on the CDMA network, we expect Sprint Direct Connect to give customers 3x greater coverage—from 900,000 square miles to approximately 2.7 million - a broader lineup of devices including smartphones, and all the benefits associated with broadband capabilities.

3G Network Improvement: Sprint expects a significant improvement in customers’ 3G network experience, including expanded coverage, improved network reliability, better voice quality, and faster 3G data speeds. Based on forecasts of data demand, Sprint is confident its 3G network will meet customers’ growing data demands.

Financial benefit to Sprint

· Sprint expects the Network Vision plan to bring financial benefit to the company.

· This is to come from reducing operating costs and also by avoiding future expenses as wireless data traffic continues to grow.

· The total estimated incremental cost of the Network Vision program over the deployment period is between $4 billion and $5 billion.

· Sprint estimates the total net financial benefit over a seven-year period will be between $10 billion and $11 billion.

· Cost savings are expected to come from capital efficiencies, reducing energy costs, lowering roaming expenses, backhaul savings and the eventual reduction in the total number of cell sites.



EV-DO Advanced, while offering operators a way to improve network performance via a software upgrade, doesn't address peak download speeds. It does, however, improve overall network capacity and latency through techniques such as load balancing, adaptive frequency reuse and single-carrier multilink. Moreover, the upgrade is compatible with existing Rev. A devices.

1X Advanced builds on 1X technology and adds techniques such as BTS interference cancellation, radio link enhancements and others to provide boosts to performance including up to a 4x increase in voice capacity and up to a 70% increase in coverage.





Sprint -- LTE-Advanced, FD-LTE + TD-LTE, VoLTE, HD Voice




Uploaded by ConvergeDigest on Oct 31, 2011

Iyad Tarazi, Sprint's VP of Network Development and Engineering, discusses the company's Network Vision, including:

* Phase 1 of the LTE rollout now and into 2012
* Phase 2 with LTE-Advanced, including 4x4 MIMO, in 2013
* Extending the Clearwire partnership by running FD-LTE alongside TD-LTE using dual mode devices
* Voice over LTE and the HD voice over the CDMA network


Network Vision/LTE Deployment







'Network Vision' Vendor Map






'Network Vision' Market Map











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[503ducati]

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=221923&

Sprint plans to upgrade its optical backbone with 400Gbit/s coherent wavelengths running on Ciena Corp. gear, the vendor is announcing Wednesday.

The new backbone will run on Ciena's 6500 Packet-Optical Platform exclusively, Ciena says. The 400Gbit/s part won't come right away, as the interfaces aren't shipping yet. Sprint and Ciena are planning for field trials to run in early 2013.

Sprint was already using Ciena's optical gear in general. The upgraded backbone is part of Sprint's overall Network Vision plan, which includes Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson AB and Samsung Corp. in other capacities.

Ciena has already said that BT Group plc will be a 400Gbit/s customer as well.

Why this matters

It's further evidence that 400Gbit/s will be important as a stopgap while the industry waits for 1Tbit/s transmission to be developed. Bandwidth demand, it seems, really is that urgent in spots.

AlcaLu implied as much in May, claiming 20 customers are ready to deploy its 400Gbit/s interfaces when they're ready at the end of the year.

[503ducati]

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/...eas/2012-07-18

July 18, 2012 | By Mike Dano

Sprint Nextel's (NYSE:S) Iyad Tarazi said the company's work with Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR) on LTE will be more efficient and targeted than its work with Clearwire on mobile WiMAX. Tarazi, vice president of Sprint's network development and engineering, made his comments during a Wells Fargo investor event, and he was joined onstage by Clearwire CTO John Saw--the joint appearance of the executives highlights the tight partnership Sprint and Clearwire have forged on their coordinated LTE buildouts.

Tarazi said during his appearance at the Wells Fargo Securities 2012 Wireless Spectrum Symposium that Sprint learned several important lessons from its mobile WiMAX wholesale deal with Clearwire. Though Tarazi made clear that Sprint considers its WiMAX efforts a success, he said the company's LTE efforts with Clearwire will focus more on capacity and less on coverage.

Specifically, Tarazi said Clearwire's mobile WiMAX network buildout competed with the resources that Sprint could have spent on its own network. With LTE, however, Tarazi said Sprint and Clearwire are working together to drop Clearwire's LTE base stations in locations where Sprint believes it will need them--rather than building out a network that would fully overlap Sprint's own LTE network


"We're going to pinpoint the [Clearwire] investment where we have the traffic," Tarazi explained, noting that 30 percent of Sprint's sites generate 70 percent of its overall traffic.


Sprint recently switched on its first handful of FDD-LTE markets. Clearwire, meanwhile, is planning to turn on 5,000 TDD-LTE base stations starting in June of next year. Sprint announced in December 2011 that it would invest up to $1.6 billion into Clearwire, and that it would use Clearwire's LTE network to supplement its own LTE build.

Interestingly, Tarazi said that Clearwire essentially replaces Sprint's need to offload its traffic to Wi-Fi. He said Sprint's coordinated LTE buildout with Clearwire will provide many of the benefits of Wi-Fi offload along with more effective handoff and traffic management.

"The Clearwire spectrum is our way of doing" Wi-Fi offload, Tarazi said. (To be clear, Sprint has previously said that Wi-Fi offloading will also be a part of its Network Vision network modernization plan.)

In other Clearwire news, the company announced that it signed a "non-binding memorandum of understanding" with China Mobile that will pave the way for TDD-LTE roaming between the two carriers. Clearwire and China Mobile are working together to promote the market for TDD-LTE technology.


Clearwire LTE build out underway


http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/...-q4/2012-09-19

http://seekingalpha.com/article/8668...the-road-ahead

Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR) CFO Hope Cochran said that the company will begin building out its TDD-LTE network this quarter but that construction will pick up significantly in the fourth quarter.

Interestingly, Cochran said that Clearwire will establish a "light" LTE core network that will feed traffic off its LTE sites into the core networks of Sprint, Leap and presumably any other facilities-based carrier that uses Clearwire's network.

Clearwire used Merrill Lynch's 2012 Media, Communications, and Entertainment Conference to once again remind the market of its leading spectrum position.

Clearwire's spectrum is 100% available for LTE usage, whereas all of its peers need to allocate spectrum to support their legacy networks. It is true that Clearwire's 2.5 GHz spectrum may not be of the caliber of 700 MHz spectrum. But, investors need to remember that Clearwire is approaching its LTE buildout differently than carriers such as AT&T or Verizon. Instead of blanketing the nation with LTE coverage, Clearwire is concentrating on what it calls "Hot Zones," which are dense, urban markets where LTE usage is greatest.

[503ducati]

Yep, that seems to be about the best use for Clearwire's 2.5GHz spectrum. I'm anxious to see how their TD-LTE network will perform.

The potential is there and it's an excellent compliment to Sprint's network. In addition, with Network Vision Sprint will be on the bleeding edge ready for the pending update to Release 10 LTE-Advanced.




http://www.lightreading.com/video.asp?doc_id=205968&


1/5/2011

[503ducati]

Sprint to use LightRadio cells

August 6th 2012
http://www.howardforums.com/showthre...9#post14889939

February 2011

[503ducati]

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/...end/2013-02-07

Network Vision: Steve Elfman, president of network operations at Sprint, said that by the end of the first quarter the carrier expects to upgrade a total of 12,000 base stations--one quarter later than previously expected. To date, he said Sprint has more than 8,000 Network Vision sites on air, and that the number of sites that are either ready for construction or already underway has grown to 19,500, around half the total number of sites to be upgraded.

Interestingly, Elfman said that Sprint now plans to deploy LTE on its 800 MHz iDEN spectrum in the fourth quarter of 2013, earlier than previous plans for a deployment in early 2014. Sprint is also starting to deploy CDMA voice service its 800 MHz spectrum, Elfman said.

From the earning's call transcript found here (10 pages): http://seekingalpha.com/article/1163...nscript?page=1

Network vision updates: Zoning complete on over 29,000 sites. Leasing complete on more than 27,000 sites.

Sprint internal correspondence discusses Network Vision Progress/Issues with Employees

http://s4gru.com/index.php?/blog/1/e...ith-employees/

With 2012 now in the rear view mirror, we think it is important to understand how Network Vision deployment is going and the excitement that's ahead in 2013. We caught up with Chad Elliott, director-Strategic Technology Programs, whose team works across business units to launch Network Vision. Here is what Chad had to say about the deployment thus far and what we have to look forward to in 2013.

Explain your role in Network Vision?

As it relates to Network Vision, our team is basically the liaison between the network functions and the rest of the business. Bob Azzi’s team is doing the heavy lifting related to development and execution, and our team then partners with other areas of the company to get things launched and make sure Sprint is ready to support and care for all of the Network Vision initiatives that we are rolling out. That includes LTE systems, Sprint Direct Connect and the actual market launches.

Last year was about getting builds under way for Network Vision, how do you think 2013 looks?

I'm really excited about 2013. We continue to see great progress. Each quarter has gotten better and while it is never easy, repeating the same activities allows you to gain some momentum. As we were finishing up 2012, we were having some of the best weeks we have seen so far, and we expect to continue that pace in January. If you look back, we've been launching five to 10 LTE markets each month since July 2012, and what gets me excited is looking at the rest of 2013 - we expect to be able to launch a lot more markets per month and really see the trend ramp up as we go through the year.

So far, we have launched 49 markets with LTE and announced nearly 150 markets where LTE is coming soon. We have well over 200 markets where we already have one or more sites on air for 3G enhancements and/or LTE. So we have a lot of work going on that will allow us to ramp up our progress in 2013.

It feels to some of us, especially as we are talking to friends, family and other customers, that the rollout of 3G enhancements and 4G LTE has been somewhat slow. From your perspective, what do you think about this? What are some of the issues that may hold up deployment in some areas?

Bottom line is that the rollout of Network Vision is not easy; it is a very complex rollout. We have tens of thousands of towers that we need to modify and each one has its own unique characteristics. Whether it is the landlord, the zoning that is required, a particular municipality and their rules, or working with the different backhaul providers, there are many different complexities that may impact the deployment process at an individual site. Kay Usry’s and John Harrison’s teams actually have a war room to understand these issues with the goal being to not let the same issue hold you up in multiple locations. So, they try to group issues and address them as we move forward.

One example at a site is that the local municipality would not allow the crew to finish repainting a water tower because it was too humid. In cases like this, Sprint doesn’t have control over that, so the crew just had to wait until they got the go ahead to continue. That particular crew was able to go work on another site, but they still had to stop at some point and go back to repaint the water tower. There have also been situations where there was miscommunication within the landlord’s company and the person on site wouldn’t give us access or they forgot to clear the parking lot to make room for a crane we arranged to be at the site.

Moreover, Network Vision isn’t just about cell sites. We're also upgrading every switch and turning up fiber ethernet across the country. Some of our competitors upgraded their switches and their backhaul to Ethernet fiber before they began cell site upgrades. They didn’t do everything all at once like we are.

So as you can tell, the complexities that can arise in a comprehensive national network rollout like Network Vision tend to be a little bit of everything – crews, equipment, uniqueness of the location, finicky landlords, weather and yes, even the birds you have heard us talk about before. Getting more crews in more places can obviously help which is what John Harrison’s team is doing. The war room I mentioned is also helpful because they work to prevent the same issue from bubbling up and impacting a lot of sites.

I feel good about the pipeline of sites that are under construction or where work can begin. The high level lifecycle is leasing, zoning and permits, and notice to proceed (NTP). Once we have an NTP, that site is ready for us to start work on. We have built a good pipeline so that if we run into an issue at one site, that crew can move to another site in that market.

Can you explain why we are often able to launch LTE in smaller cities before we're able to announce larger markets?

Sure. First, let me explain why we came up with our Network Vision market structure because internally most people are probably used to Sprint’s 99 geographic areas that we use to group customers or network locations. This 99 market structure works well internally but it doesn’t translate very well when we are trying to communicate to customers. A good example is when we say the Kansas market - internally everyone knows this is a unique geographic area that covers only a fraction of the state of Kansas and also includes a significant portion of Missouri. But externally, if we said we are launching Kansas, most people probably think it is the actual state as you see it on a map. So we had to come up with a way to talk about where our network is externally. At the same time, our competitors were starting to use market counts in their advertising. If we stuck with only our 99 markets, we’d be at an unnecessary disadvantage.

Ultimately, we came up with using a Census Bureau methodology of micropolitan statistical areas and metropolitan statistical areas to define markets in a way that customers can understand. Most people are familiar with the term metropolitan and for micropolitan area, the best definition I have seen was when it was the Time magazine word of the week, and they defined it as a small but regionally important population center. This approach aligns with what our competitors are doing and will allow us to announce hundreds of markets versus just the 99.

Now back to your question about market launches. We launch a market when we have a reasonable coverage footprint that will allow many users to experience LTE in the market. And while we started building in the large markets like Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago early in the process, it takes more sites in those cities before we can launch than in a smaller micropolitan area. For instance, having 50 sites up in New York City is not the same from a footprint standpoint as having 50 sites up in Wichita, Kan. Thus we are able to launch some smaller markets much sooner. But we are building all over the country, so the good news for customers in larger metropolitan areas is, if they have an LTE-capable device and are within coverage of a site we have completed, that they can often experience LTE even before we officially launch in their market.

Using your example above, if we were to stop work in Wichita could we launch New York City sooner?

As I mentioned, we started building with the larger markets, so it is not that we started them late and are trying to catch up. It just takes more sites to have the footprint to launch the larger markets. So what you’re essentially asking is if we have access to crews in Wichita that would be willing to travel to New York City. Probably not. Across all the markets, we work with different vendors and different crews and subcontractors, so it’s not as easy as just moving a crew to another location. In addition, not every person is licensed or has the expertise to work on every single type of site.

In general, are we pleased with the performance we are seeing at Network Vision sites both on the 3G and 4G side?

Overall the calls to Care related to our LTE launches have been minimal. To me that is a good indication that when they have the device and get LTE coverage, the customers are having a positive experience. Considering LTE is brand new, it has gone smoother than expected.

With LTE, you can turn up a site by someone’s house and they can take advantage of that right away. On the 3G enhancements, it takes a larger group of sites being turned up before you really see the full advantages of the optimization, so it can take a little bit longer to experience the benefits. Take the Chicago area for example; if you go back and look at the initial areas where we started 3G enhancements, the network operation metrics have really improved in that area. In Nov. 2012, the block rate for voice calls in Chicago was at the lowest rate in the past three years. So even while the 3G enhancements in the market aren’t complete yet, we are seeing the benefits of the program; it just took a little longer to get there.

What is the biggest challenge for you in your role?

Probably the biggest thing is being patient. I sometimes have a hard time with that and always want to go faster and get more done. But, I recognize Network Vision is challenging and complex and thus takes time and patience.

What is the most gratifying thing for you in your role?

Probably the teamwork. We have a broad core team including sales, marketing, corporate communications and customer care. Everyone is really motivated to make Network Vision a success, and if we have issues pop up, everybody is willing to jump in and do what they can to help. It has made it really easy and rewarding to work with everyone because it is such a motivated team.