Sprint lays out its wireless broadband network plans

Sprint announced Thursday that it is speeding up its broadband wireless network this year while expanding its geographic reach.

The carrier says it is upgrading its network with EV-DO Revision A technology later this year and plans to have faster services available to customers in the first quarter of 2007.

Today Sprint has EV-DO Revision O deployed throughout its network. This technology reaches 150 million people across the U.S. today. Sprint has the most widely deployed broadband wireless network today, says Barry Tishgart, senior director of product management at Sprint.

Verizon makes the same claim that it has “the nation’s largest high-speed wireless broadband network.” But it looks like Sprint has outpaced Verizon. Verizon’s EV-DO network reaches 148 million people and 72 airports. Sprint says its network reaches 150 million people and 470 airports.

With EV-DO Revision A technology, the next-generation EV-DO specification, customers can expect to increase their peak download data rates from 2Mbps to 3.1Mbps. Peak upload data rates are expected to jump from 144Kbps up to 1.8Mbps.

According to the carrier, average download data rates improve marginally from a range of 400Kbps to 700Kbps up to a range of 450Kbps to 800Kbps. And uplink speeds jump to a range of 300Kbps to 400Kbps from 70Kbps to 144Kbps.

The slower speeds are based on Sprint’s current EV-DO network service.

Sprint says it is expanding its EV-DO Revision O technology to additional markets now, with plans to reach 190 million people with its service by year-end.

The carrier says it will “concurrently” deploy an EV-DO Revision A overlay network with mostly software and some hardware upgrades. These upgrades will be part of Sprint’s overall capital spending of about $6.3 billion for 2006, which the carrier announced in March.

Sprint says its EV-DO Revision A network will reach 220 million people by the end of the third quarter of 2007.

Last year Verizon Wireless made a few announcements about testing EV-DO Revision A with the vendor stating it too plans to deploy the faster technology in 2006.