Sprint announced the first cities to receive its LTE service planned for launch later this year. CEO Dan Hesse announced at the Citigroup Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference that customers in Dallas, Atlanta, Houston and San Antonio are expected to be among the first to benefit from LTE and improved 3G coverage in the first half of 2012. Sprint's Network Vision plan involves the deployment of multimode base stations across many of Sprint's cell sites throughout the country. As base stations are deployed, customers will notice immediate improvements in voice quality, signal density and data speeds, the operator said. The first completed deployment of a multimode base station was in Branchburg, New Jersey, in December 2011. The operator also announced Sprint Direct Connect on its CDMA network. This was an upgrade of the push-to-talk service with the launch of new CDMA devices in September 2011. More CDMA push-to-talk devices will be announced in the coming months, Sprint said.
