Sprint this morning announced their plans to deploy EV-DO Revision A on their network. The retrofit to Sprint’s EV-DO network will boost average download speeds to 450 – 800 kbps. More important, it will boost upload speeds to 300 – 400k. This is an increase of over twice the upload speeds of the current EV-DO/1xRTT network.
EV-DO Rev A will open doors to new technologies such as video calling, and other upload-dependent tasks, including Sprint’s upcoming QChat unified PTT network. Sprint plans to begin upgrading their network in the fourth quarter of this year. By the end of the year, Sprint expects to have coverage to 40 million people.
By the end of 2006, Sprint expects combined EV-DO Revision 0 and A to reach 200 million people across 220 metropolitan areas. Sprint also boasts a goal of 908 airports will be covered by the end of 2006. Sprint also announced that EV-DO Rev A test calls have been completed on-network, a sign that Sprint is near ready to begin deployment.
