MCI INTERVIEW MCI INTERVIEW
Strong foundations
Stephen Bye, Chief Technology Officer at Sprint Nextel, talks about the importance of good groundwork when pulling together as many networks as the US carrier operates.
U
S carrier Sprint officially an- nounced plans to begin of- fering LTE services to more than 250 million potential customers in early October. As the industry’s worst kept secret the move came as no surprise, but what did raise eyebrows was the firm’s target launch date of mid-2012 with a view to full network build out by 2013. A full two years sooner than anticipated. We caught up with Stephen Bye,
chief technology officer of Sprint, just a few days after the announce- ment, and spoke to him about the challenges ahead and the ground- work that has already gone into the programme. Bye moved to Sprint from US cable carrier Cox Communications, which had been dabbling with LTE as a platform for rolling out services over wireless. But Sprint represented a whole new set of challenges. As well as the WiMAX network at 2.5GHz, it also runs a CDMA EVDO 3G net- work at 1900MHz as well as Nextel’s legacy iDen network, operating at 800MHz. Operating all these technolo- gies together makes for a large, bulky and relatively inefficient macro base station set-up, a challenge that has already been addressed by the firm’s Network Vision initiative, which is a universal rebuild of the network on a next generation multi mode cabinet architecture. While the announcement on Oc- tober 7 was the news everyone had been waiting for, Sprint’s CTO is eager to highlight the importance of the Network Vision project, unveiled in December 2010, as the foundation stone for the network upgrade. “October 7 wasn’t the ‘now let’s begin’ point of our network upgrade. A lot had already happened by then, work had been going on for months, to develop the roadmap for the tech-
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Stephen Bye
nology and make sure there was a device ecosystem,” Bye says. “In fact, a much bigger announcement was the Network Vision initiative that came out almost a year ago. “This is the real network mod-
ernisation plan. We’re rebuilding the network with multimode base station capabilities. This is what really laid the foundation for us, so the LTE announcement is really just the next chapter of that, the next step along that continuum.” An overhaul of the operator’s bas-
estations packs more equipment into a smaller space and replaces ageing, signal degrading coax with fibre. Multimode cabinets allow Sprint to use different RF technologies on dif-
ferent frequency bands, so the firm can have a combination of CDMA, LTE or WiMAX across different radio bearers, be it 800MHz or 1.9MHz. The idea is to make the addition of new technologies much smoother, but Bye is careful to avoid the term “rip and replace” for the network upgrade. “No, it’s not a rip and replace strat-
egy. We already have over 50 million customers on our network and a sustainable and solid business with infrastructure in place today. But we recognise the move forward will need us to modernise that network, so Network Vision enables us to deploy a next generation platform in parallel with our existing business and then as that platform turns up we migrate »
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