Qualcomm, Sprint and Softbank have declared that they will work on bringing the still-developing 5G New Radio standard to 2.5 GHz so that Sprint can deploy commercial “5G” services.
Although the companies offered few details, they said that they “plan to provide commercial services and devices in late 2019.”
Sprint has put particular emphasis on its 2.5 GHz holdings as an opportunity for relatively low-band 5G deployments. Sprint CFO Tarek Robbiati Robbiati said late last year that, “In our mind, 2.5 GHz is going to be to 5G what 800 [MHz] is to the 4G world.”
