Sprint Nextel said it is on schedule to shut down part of the network assets it received in a deal earlier this year to purchase markets from U.S. Cellular.
Sprint said it will turn down the U.S. Cellular network in the St. Louis metropolitan area, plus parts of Missouri and Illinois, on Oct. 31 in order to re-use the spectrum to enhance its own services. Customers will be affected if they don’t move their service to Sprint or another carrier by that date; Sprint said it began sending letters to affected customers in June and is making exclusive offers in those markets to entice postpaid customers to Sprint and U.S. Cellular prepaid customers to its Boost Mobile brand.
Sprint Nextel paid $480 million for the market acquisitions, and closed on the deal in May of this year. The purchase included spectrum assets in the 1.9 Ghz band, and at close Sprint said the transaction included about 420,000 subscribers.
–Distributed antenna system and Wi-Fi provider Boingo Wireless announced a partnership with Latin American wireless provider Movile for international roaming. Movile selected Boingo to provide global Wi-Fi roaming for 8 million users that rely on Movile’s mobile Wi-Fi service. The deal gives Movile users access to Boingo’s aggregated network of more than 700,000 hotspots worldwide, starting this fall.
—Aruba Networks said that Gwynedd-Mercy College in Philadelphia, Pa. deployed its technology for a new wireless LAN. The installation includes Aruba’s AP-105 access points, mobility controllers and its AirWave solution for network management. Gwynedd-Mercy is testing Aruba’s Clearpass access management solution and expects to deploy that later this year.
The network includes support for the school’s iPad initiative, in which is provides iPads to some faculty and graduate students for fieldwork.
—Radisys Corp.’s solution for media processing for Voice over LTE and Rich Communications Services in LTE networks has won 2012’s Communications Solutions Product of the Year from TMC and the editors of Internet Telephony and Customer magazines. The company’s MPX-12000 Broadband Media Resource Function (MRF) is designed to improve audio and video capacity while allowing operators to monetize those media streams.
Radisys noted that the MPX-12000 and its software MRF are being deployed in a dozen VoLTE trials around the world, as well as in deployment for MetroPCS.
