Why Sprint has seen an improvement in its network performance

Why Sprint’s stock plunged after the earnings announcement (Part 10 of 16)

(Continued from Part 9)

Sprint made progress on completing its 4G LTE network build

Sprint (S) is in the process of replacing its entire 3G network with a high-speed 4G/LTE network. Its Long-Term Evolution (or LTE) coverage now covers 260 million people in the U.S. across 500 cities.

Sprint's network works on three spectrums:

1. 800 megahertz (or MHz)
2. 1.9 gigahertz (or GHz)
3. 2.5 GHz

Sprint Spark service combines these spectrums. It has the potential to deliver wireless speeds of 50–60 megabits per second (or Mbps) on 4G LTE network. A few months ago, Sprint also claimed that it partnered with chip maker  Qualcomm (QCOM) to provide peak data speeds in excess of 150 Mbps on its devices.

Now, Sprint expects the nationwide deployment of voice service on the 800 MHz spectrum to be complete by the end of this calendar year. It has reached 50% of the total LTE footprint. In regards to the 2.5 GHz spectrum, Sprint mentioned that it's on track to cover 100 million point of presence (or PoP) by the end of the year. It already reached coverage of 92 million. However, to speed up the transition, the company is planning to only focus on three to five markets in the U.S. at the beginning.

Sprint definitely made some progress in terms of network build—compared to last quarter. Market Realist covered this aspect in " Why Sprint continues to lose subscribers in 2014 ."

Sprint continues to have the worst network performance

Sprint also claimed that the preliminary results by an independent research firm indicate that Sprint achieved significant year-over-year (or YoY) improvement in all aspects of network performance in the second half of 2014. However, this wasn't the case in the first half of 2014.

According to a report from RootScore and as the above chart shows, Verizon (VZ) had the best overall network performance. It was followed by AT&T (T). T-Mobile (TMUS) had the next best performance. Sprint was the worst performer in the first half of 2014.

The overall performance takes into account various parameters like network reliability, coverage, data performance, call performance, and text performance.

Continue to Part 11

Browse this series on Market Realist:

• Part 1 – Must-know: Sprint's stock decreased after the earnings
• Part 2 – Why Apple's iPhone 6 could instill life into Sprint
• Part 3 – Why Sprint is targeting prime customers to improve its churn rate

• Information Technology
• network performance