Sprint Announces First LTE Cities and, Prematurely, Its First LTE Phone
Sprint made a bunch of 4G network news on Thursday and some of it was even intentional. — On the intended front, CEO Dan Hesse told investors that the company would launch its first high-speed LTE service …
Context & Ripple Effects
Sprint's 4G story has been a pivot story. After betting its comeback on WiMax in 2009, it committed in October 2011 to an LTE buildout covering 120 cities by end of 2012 — a tacit admission that its original WiMax wager had left it behind Verizon and AT&T on next-generation speed. On Thursday, CEO Dan Hesse gave investors the first concrete markers: named launch cities for the new network, plus a first LTE device.
The wrinkle is sequencing — the phone was announced before the service it needs exists, which is why AllThingsD flags it as premature. Hesse paired the network news with his value pitch, touting the simplified rate plans he cut by 85 percent in November and the 'Truly Unlimited' data offer, though critics on the call noted the plan's actual limits sit uneasily beside that name.
First-order effects
- Sprint's first LTE markets now have public commitments attached to them, putting Hesse's team on the clock against the end-of-2012 target set in October.
- The early phone announcement leaves Sprint selling a device whose headline feature — LTE speed — is unavailable at launch, a gap competitors can exploit in side-by-side comparisons.
Second-order effects
- Verizon and AT&T, already operating LTE networks, face pressure to counter Sprint's unlimited-data positioning rather than compete on raw speed, where they currently hold the advantage.
- Sprint's WiMax ecosystem — devices and infrastructure partners from the 2009 strategy — gets further marginalized as investment and marketing dollars shift to LTE.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US carrier competition in the 4G era settles into a split between network-speed leaders and price/unlimited-data challengers, with each carrier's messaging calibrated to whichever side of that line it occupies.
- Announcement cadence is becoming decoupled from deployment reality: carriers increasingly pre-announce devices and city lists to shape investor perception, forcing analysts and buyers to discount launch-date claims.
The trend: The US 4G race is entering a phase where carriers' marketing timelines run ahead of their networks, and Sprint is repositioning from speed laggard to unlimited-data value player.