Sprint chief operating officer says VoLTE is “on our roadmap”
Günther Ottendorfer, Sprint COO of Technology and former COO of T-Mobile Austria, took to the Sprint sub-Reddit this week to participate in an “ask me anything” with brand devotees.
Questions ranged from consumer-facing to network-related and even personal – for instance, Ottendorfer says he’s “the highest ranked Austrian badminton player in Overland Park, maybe even in all of Kansas.”
On the network side, Reddit user u/sherifhanna, who works in technical marketing for Qualcomm, asked: “Given that your carrier aggregation deployments are heavily based on small cells and the fact that higher order modulation (256-QAM in the downlink) was designed for small cells, any chance you will turn on 256-QAM to provide an additional speed boost on top of 3xCA [three-channel carrier aggregation]? Lots of devices can support this now.”
Without giving too much away, Ottendorfer replied: “There’s a very high chance for that!” Sprint has been testing three-channel carrier aggregation in Chicago and it’s home market of Kansas City.
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User u/UPDguy, who says he is a mobile retail rep for Best Buy, asked: “Can you give us an idea on VoLTE release? Will it be nationwide? You’d be surprised how many customers I have leave without an upgrade or to a different carrier because they can not talk and surf …”
Ottendorfer answered: “VoLTE is on our roadmap and we’ll make the move as soon as we can ensure that our customers have an even superior voice experience than today. It is tied to our densification and optimization strategy.”
Check out the full AMA here. And our own Editor-in-Chief Dan Meyer had the opportunity recently to discuss Sprint’s 5G plans with Ottendorfer on this episode of RCRtv’s Carrier Wrap.