Sprint adds 15 new regional carriers to its LTE rural roaming program

Sprint still has to fill in some big holes in its urban LTE footprint — San Francisco being the most glaring example – but it’s making progress bringing 4G coverage to many rural regions of the country. On Friday Sprint announced roaming deals with 15 new regional carriers serving customers in 12 states.

The carriers are all part of Sprint’s Rural Roaming Preferred Program, in which Sprint not only agrees to share its networks with its roaming partners but also leases them spectrum so they can build LTE networks of their own. Sprint has also agreed to make its own phones interoperable on these carriers’ airwaves, which is key to ensuring customers can move freely between networks.

Here’s a complete list of the 15 new partners:

• Bluegrass Cellular (Kentucky)

• Blue Wireless (New York and Pennsylvania)

• Pine Belt Wireless (Alabama)

• Pioneer Cellular (Oklahoma and Kansas)

• Public Service Wireless (Alabama and Georgia)

• Syringa Wireless (Idaho)

• STRATA Networks (Utah, Wyoming and Colorado)

• Silver Star Wireless (Wyoming and Idaho)

• All West Wireless Inc (Wyoming and Utah)

• NNTC (Colorado)

• Snake River Personal Communications Service (Oregon)

• CTC Telecom (Idaho)

• South Central Communications (Utah)

• Custer Telephone Wireless (Idaho)

• Breakaway Wireless (Utah)

In all Sprint has 27 carriers in the program. Combined, they operate in 27 states and cover a population of 38 million.

Image copyright Shutterstock / Nneirda.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How new devices, networks, and consumer habits will change the web experience

• What the future holds for mobile broadband

• For the future of femtocells, opportunity still exists

More From paidContent.org

• Sprint adds 15 new regional carriers to its LTE rural roaming program