Sprint has announced their partners to help lay the ground work for their next generation network without Clearwire. Ericsson, Samsung and Alcatel-Lucent have been chosen to help out in this task. The project, named Network Vision, will expect to take 5 years to complete and will cost the carrier $4 billion to $5 billion. The main goal of the project is to replace their wireless equipment on thousands of cell towers, rooftops and locations all over the country with more advanced technology that can handle wireless traffic for a wide band of wireless spectrum. At the moment, Sprint uses separate equipment to handle their network duties- Sprint’s CDMA, Nextel’s iDEN and their WiMAX broadband provided by Clearwire. By eliminating old technology (iDEN) and their dependence on Clearwire for wireless broadband, this movei to unite all their services to use the same equipment will make future plans to upgrade the network would be a much more streamlined and easy process. But replacing all current equipment is going to take some time. Let’s see if this move will help boost them out of their current slump in the mobile industry.
