A recent Bloomberg report has confirmed that Nokia’s new direction focused on wireless equipment has proven to be a big windfall for the company after its Devices and Services division was sold to Microsoft last year.
To that end, it is now partnering with Sprint on its Network Vision initiative as the latest network hardware partner and has done so in a big way, by demonstrating a peak burst of 2.6Gbps in a recent Sprint Spark network test by tapping into Sprint’s sizable 2.5 GHz spectrum holdings and using LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation to bond together 120 MHz of spectrum to provide those speeds.
The advantage of Sprint implementing the time division variant of LTE is that it can devote more of its bandwidth to downstream activity if there isn’t much upstream activity on the network compared to older LTE networks using the frequency division implementation. Sprint can also use nearly all of its 120 MHz of spectrum in the 2.5GHz band to create a massive connection, while other carriers would be limited to using half their bandwidth because of their LTE implementations that rely on frequency division, that splits bandwidth into separate channels as demand increases.
Nokia and Sprint have also stated plans to recreate the 2.6Gbps network trial at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year as a further example of the new relationship between both companies. However, the network trials do not mean that the Sprint Spark network will support those speeds, and it remains doubtful that any network would be able to outside of Japan and Korea owing to physics and lack of sufficient backhaul. Currently Sprint’s Spark LTE network is available in the following markets and is expected to roll out in more cities during the year:
- Kansas City, MO
- Austin, TX
- Chicago, IL
- Dallas, TX
- Fort Lauderdale, FL
- Fort Worth, TX
- Houston, TX
- Los Angeles, CA
- Miami, FL
- New York. NY
- San Antonio, TX
- Tampa, FL
