Sprint this week unveiled the Sprint Magic Box, a new plug–and–play LTE small cell for businesses and consumers. Sprint claims that the Magic Box can dramatically improves data coverage and increases download and upload speeds on average by 200 percent.
The Sprint Magic Box is an indoor, self-configuring small cell, about the size of a shoebox, that’s easy for customers to install. It requires no implementation, labor, or rental costs that are a hurdle for many traditional small cell deployments. The unit is simply placed near a window and plugged into a power outlet.
Sprint designed the Sprint Magic Box so that customers in surrounding areas will also enjoy the benefits of the locally installed unit. One Sprint Magic Box provides average coverage of 30,000 square feet indoors and can benefit adjacent Sprint customers inside the building. The signal can also extend coverage 100 meters outside a building, benefitting Sprint customers in nearby buildings and improving street–level network performance.
Sprint Magic Box deployment has begun in several cities across the country such as Denver, San Francisco, Indianapolis, New York, Chicago, and Houston. In the past three months downloads speeds across these markets have significantly improved as Sprint rolled-out its toolkit of densification technologies such as Sprint Magic Box, outdoor small cells, three-channel carrier aggregation, and launched iconic new High Performance User Equipment (HPUE) smartphones, said the Operator.
Looking ahead, Sprint said it will continue its deployment of three-channel carrier aggregation on 2.5 GHz sites. The company also anticipates leveraging a multitude of advanced technologies including four-channel carrier aggregation, 256 QAM, 4x4 MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) and Massive MIMO to further enhance the capacity and coverage of its 2.5 GHz TDD-LTE spectrum.
Dr. John Saw, Sprint CTO
Sprint Magic Box is going to quickly transform our network, and it is key to delivering an amazing experience to customers today as we build the kind of dense urban infrastructures needed for 5G. By leveraging our deep spectrum trove, Sprint has the ability to blanket its network with an all-wireless small cell that delivers this kind of dramatic performance boost with zero backhaul, permitting, and engineering costs.
