Soon after T-Mobile announced its plans for launching a nationwide 5G network, Sprint has followed through with its own announcement. The country’s fourth largest mobile carrier has confirmed today that it’s aiming to develop and launch a proper 5G network by the end of 2019. For this purpose, Sprint is going to team up with its parent company SoftBank and chipmaker Qualcomm.
Sprint hasn’t provided a lot of details about its 5G plans right now, but it has publicly shared the ambition of having it live by 2019. Sprint’s press release doesn’t offer much in the way of details.
It only states that Sprint, Qualcomm, and SoftBank have jointly agreed to develop technologies for 5G, including the 3GPP New Radio standard in the 2.5 GHz for “accelerated wide-scale 5G deployments.”
It’s also mentioned that the companies are planning to provide commercial services and devices in late 2018. Additional details about this network will be provided separately by the companies at some point in the future. Sprint is the second carrier that’s aiming to launch a proper 5G network by 2019.
T-Mobile has also made a similar claim, that it will be able to have its nationwide 5G network live within two years. It remains to be seen whether the carriers will be able to meet their ambitious timelines. We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out.