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Sprint Announces 'Magic Box' to Improve LTE Data Download and Upload Speeds By 200%
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I’ve read reports before of the dangers of wifi and at least in your home your better off just wiring the home for internet instead of using wifi. Not really practical advice though. Who knows if in 20 years we start to see a surge in various cancers being reported. This box boosting the wifi signal by god knows how much would be worrisome in terms of what it might do to your health in the long run.
Completely different.. those are femtocells that use your internet connection to create a new cell tower. This is a device that uses an already existing sprint LTE signal, cleans it up and rebroadcasts it.
This is actually a really fascinating approach to densification.
When Sprint acquired Clearwire back in 2012, they got a big chunk of 2.5GHz spectrum as part of the deal. It's slightly unusual spectrum in that it doesn't have a paired band of uplink and downlink channels like almost every other licensed cellular frequency - it's one contiguous block.
Clearwire was using that spectrum for WiMax, another 4G technology that competes with LTE. But WiMax never really took off in the US, and Sprint has since replaced the WiMax towers (and added to them) with LTE equipment, running the TDD (Time-Division Duplex) variant of LTE instead of the more typical FDD (Frequency-Division Duplex, requires paired uplink/downlink bands). So the bandwidth is now being used as LTE "Band 41," and almost all of Sprint's new devices support it. Band 41 is unusually wide. It's 194MHz in total. To give you some context: Verizon's entire LTE Band 13 700MHz network is just 20MHz in total. And one last note: higher frequencies are able to transfer proportionally more bits per MHz of bandwidth.
So they have just a ton of spare capacity at a very high frequency. And that means that they can push a lot of data through that pipe.
The problem is, higher frequencies don't penetrate buildings as well. So this new Magic Box product–which, sure, is bulky and ugly–provides a way of getting some of that capacity inside buildings, which is where 80% of data usage happens.
The one big pitfall in all this is that Sprint doesn't support Voice over LTE yet. And most of the consumers/businesses who might want to install this thing are going to want it primarily because their voice coverage sucks. But that's just a matter of time - I'd be really surprised if they weren't working on the upgrades necessary to support VoLTE now.
(Why I know so much about this stuff: I'm CEO of RSRF, and we do in-building coverage solutions. I'm really hoping that they included at least a "donor antenna" port, in case signal by the window isn't very strong.)
When Sprint acquired Clearwire back in 2012, they got a big chunk of 2.5GHz spectrum as part of the deal. It's slightly unusual spectrum in that it doesn't have a paired band of uplink and downlink channels like almost every other licensed cellular frequency - it's one contiguous block.
Clearwire was using that spectrum for WiMax, another 4G technology that competes with LTE. But WiMax never really took off in the US, and Sprint has since replaced the WiMax towers (and added to them) with LTE equipment, running the TDD (Time-Division Duplex) variant of LTE instead of the more typical FDD (Frequency-Division Duplex, requires paired uplink/downlink bands). So the bandwidth is now being used as LTE "Band 41," and almost all of Sprint's new devices support it. Band 41 is unusually wide. It's 194MHz in total. To give you some context: Verizon's entire LTE Band 13 700MHz network is just 20MHz in total. And one last note: higher frequencies are able to transfer proportionally more bits per MHz of bandwidth.
So they have just a ton of spare capacity at a very high frequency. And that means that they can push a lot of data through that pipe.
The problem is, higher frequencies don't penetrate buildings as well. So this new Magic Box product–which, sure, is bulky and ugly–provides a way of getting some of that capacity inside buildings, which is where 80% of data usage happens.
The one big pitfall in all this is that Sprint doesn't support Voice over LTE yet. And most of the consumers/businesses who might want to install this thing are going to want it primarily because their voice coverage sucks. But that's just a matter of time - I'd be really surprised if they weren't working on the upgrades necessary to support VoLTE now.
(Why I know so much about this stuff: I'm CEO of RSRF, and we do in-building coverage solutions. I'm really hoping that they included at least a "donor antenna" port, in case signal by the window isn't very strong.)