Yesterday, Sprint officially announced it now offers HD voice service nationwide on its network, wrapped around a "30 day risk-free trial" press event. T-Mobile US was quick to shoot it down. Don't believe the spin that Sprint has scored a marketing coup. If anything, the announcement only goes to underline the mess a Sprint/T-Mobile merger would be.
T-Mobile launched HD voice service on its 3G HSPA network back in January 2013, so it has had nationwide coverage for just about 1.5 years. It is now rolling out Voice over LTE (VoLTE) on its 4G LTE network, providing HD voice and faster call setup time and maybe other bells and whistles if you believe the marketing spin coming out of Verizon.
Sprint announced it would deploy HD voice on its 3G CDMA network in April 2012 with a "limited" rollout by the end of 2012. It started selling handsets back in May 2012. If a customer bought an HTC EVO 4G LTE phone on Friday, May 18, 2012—the first date of sale for a phone supporting LTE and 3G HD voice—on a two year contract, the contract was up for renewable by a couple of months by the time Sprint turned up service nationwide.
It is not a "marketing coup" when it takes over two years to roll out HD voice nationwide. It is also not a "marketing coup" when the HD voice service is tied to 3G CDMA technology that is incompatible with the AMR-WB codec standard in rest of the world's GSM/HSPA networks and VoLTE.
Touting HD voice on a 3G network is putting lipstick on a pig. The future is LTE, as even Sprint's "Spark" hype recognizes. Translating between 3G HD voice and the rest of the AMR-WB mobile HD voice world is going to cause headaches and cost Sprint money in transcoding between formats.
Sprint should have spent the money and time on getting to LTE and VoLTE faster, instead of trying to dress up its CDMA network. For all the scorn I have heaped on Verizon for overhyping VoLTE and LTE, it did not go down the path of throwing good money into its CDMA legacy network.
T-Mobile CEO John Legere called it best in a tweet yesterday -- "Is there any actual NEWS coming out of @sprint today!? #HDvoice is so two thousand and late!!!"
Legere's sound bite reflects a deeper issue between T-Mobile and Sprint. T-Mobile clearly has the "Warrior Spirit" to deploy new technology and go after business. Sprint continues to make the wrong cellular network technology decisions (i.e., WiMAX, 3G HD voice) , rather than streamlining its approach.
Should Softbank engineer a merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, it is assumed Legere would be in charge of the joint company. He will have an uphill battle trying to change the Sprint network engineering culture as well as build the right team who can integrate the two company's disparate cellular networks. It is not going to be pretty.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle 
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