Furthering speculation that Sprint may be considering adopting LTE network technology to serve alongside WiMAX, on Wednesday the company issued a request for proposal (RFP) from 4G equipment manufacturers as it looks into which technologies will best its aging CDMA network. LTE equipment manufacturers were not excluded from the RFP. Sprint, which also co-operates a 4G WiMAX network with Clearwire, has recently been indicating an openness to LTE with its CEO Dan Hesse recently saying that Sprint could easily make the switch from WiMAX to LTE if necessary. Yesterday, Sprint’s Mathew Oommen, VP of device and technology development, said that Sprint needs to “future proof” its network and that it must “leverage all the assets we have in such a way that offers us the lowest cost per bit” while not becoming “prescriptive to a particular technology.” Kevin Packingham, senior VP of product technology, added to Oommen’s comments stating that “there’s nothing that prevents us from […] moving to LTE. We’re doing a technology evaluation and making a decision on our core network and how we want to evolve that going forward.” Whether or not Sprint will actually make a decision to adopt LTE remains to be seen, but if it does, Sprint would be the fourth U.S. carrier to do so after AT&T, Verizon and MetroPCS.
[Via Phone Scoop]
