Alcatel-Lucent’s mini base station solution will be used to support Sprint’s services across indoor, outdoor, urban hotspot and rural applications.
Sprint said its initial deployment will focus on indoor areas, including entertainment venues, transportation hubs and business campuses.
The mini base stations can be deployed on lamp posts, street signs, in shopping malls or stadiums and will prove particularly useful in dense urban areas to fill gaps in coverage – particularly when tall buildings block cellular signals.
Predominant infrastructures in today’s market tend to consist of powerful cellular base stations with a longer range, and signals are available over several blocks. They are mounted on large cellular towers, but Alcatel-Lucent’s solutions comes in different shapes and sizes and can be deployed almost anywhere.
Sprint said the technological deployment would also cater to the carrier’s 4G LTE capacity before its next-generation network roll-out. There is less of a chance it will be used to provide Wifi coverage, considering the fact that public venues and corporate locations are already covered by Wifi connectivity.
Alcatel-Lucent confirmed Sprint was the first carrier to announce plans to use its LightRadio product on its network.
