New York City, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Washington D.C. have become the latest cities to get Sprint’s True Mobile 5G, with reported average speeds of 203.8 Mbps - nearly 6x faster than Sprint's average LTE download speed.
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These four new cities join Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Kansas City, and Chicago, which became 5G-enabled between May and July of 2019. This takes Sprint’s 5G coverage to a total of nine cities, now covering approximately 2,100 square miles, and around 11 million people.
"We're proud to give Sprint customers their first truly mobile 5G experience in some of the biggest cities in the U.S."
Sprint CEO Michel Combes
"We're proud to give Sprint customers their first truly mobile 5G experience in some of the biggest cities in the U.S.," said Sprint CEO Michel Combes. "With our initial nine market launches complete, it is just the start of what we can achieve with T-Mobile, together building a better, faster, nationwide mobile 5G network that benefits all U.S. businesses and consumers."
To access the True Mobile service you will need to subscribe to Sprint’s Unlimited Premium plan, which offers Unlimited data, talk and text, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Twitch Prime, Tidal HiFi, full HD streaming and 100 GB LTE mobile hotspot (and if you use Sprint’s AutoPay system, you can currently get it for $80 per month).
To deliver its 5G services Sprint is using technology known as Massive MIMO, which essentially means a lot more antennas are being used to deploy the service. Sprint is using 64T64R - 64 transmitters 64 receivers - 5G Massive MIMO radios from Nokia, which run on its 2.5 GHz mid-band spectrum, and are deployed on Sprint's existing 4G cell sites. And by using existing cells, Sprint claims it can roll out a high quality 5G service far quicker than its competitors.
The launch also provides another opportunity for Sprint to further promote its #5GForAll campaign, as it continues to advocate for a $26bn merger with T-Mobile, which was approved by the US Department of Justice in July. Sprint claims that the merger will accelerate 5G deployment in rural locations, and will provide US businesses with an edge, “dramatically increasing competition, unleashing new economic growth, and creating thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in U.S. economic value”.
