LAS VEGAS--Sprint is planning an aggressive rollout of EV-DO revision A networks starting this year and culminating in the second half of 2007 with almost the entirety of its CDMA network upgraded. But while the latest evolution of EV-DO technology is practically designed from the ground up to replace traditional circuit-switched voice with next-generation VoIP, Sprint officials said that the carrier is holding off on immediate plans for IP voice, choosing instead to focus on how the enhanced network can improve existing and new broadband data applications.

Sprint Nextel director of product marketing Barry Tishgart said that Sprint plans to launch a high-performance push-to-talk service in 2008 running entirely on an IP connection, but its plans for end-to-end VoIP are even further out. The EV-DO revision A network, however, certainly won’t go to waste, Tishgart said. Sprint plans to use the extra capacity on both the uplink and the downlink to launch new broadband data applications and enhance existing ones. What those applications would be, Tishgart wouldn’t say, but he added that the data speeds and lower latencies of revision A would greatly facilitate things like live gaming and other peer-to-peer consumer multimedia apps.

“Now we’re laying the groundwork,” he said. “We’ve got a [schedule] in place that will allow us to rollout revision A very quickly … We’re telling our customers we’re committed to being a leader in this market.”

Revision A supports theoretical download speeds of 3.1 Mb/s, up from 1.8 Mb/s, but more significantly to peer-to-peer applications, it boosts uplink capacity from a meager 153 kb/s to 1.8 Mb/s. Sprint estimates that real-world averages for the enhanced network will be in line with 450 kb/s to 800 kb/s upstream and 300 kb/s to 400 kb/s downstream. The technology also lowers latency--the delay over the network between requesting data and receiving it--and is the first 3G technology to bring QoS over the network, which would allow carriers to prioritize key traffic like VoIP.

Sprint has said that its ultimate goal is to migrate its entire service portfolio onto an IP-based platform, which was one of the key reasons it selected the EV-DO evolutionary path over technologies like EV-DO. Tishgart stressed that while end-to-end VoIP is a goal, it is still a distant one. But until then, the same technical benefits that would apply to voice can apply to numerous other applications though, Tishgart said. On the enterprise side, the additional capacity and QoS would enable more robust and dependable data applications, allowing Sprint to extend the data service level agreements it started offering last year.

For the first time, Sprint will have a booth at CTIA’s Wireless show, where it will be demonstrating the new technologies, using Nortel Networks’ base station gear and PC cards developed by Sierra Wireless and Novatel.