C Spire announced this week that it is nearly done with a multimillion-dollar wireless network upgrade involving 252 cell sites in 41 Mississippi counties. The company said it is using new spectrum to improve capacity and speeds for thousands of customers.
C Spire claims to be the nation’s largest privately-owned mobile services network. The targeted program is part of the firm’s broader efforts to prepare for the next generation of cellular technology.
The nearly-completed project, which started in February, comes right after a separate company effort to install new base stations and software at all of its 1,200-plus cell sites.
“As a customer-inspired company, we are constantly fine-tuning our network to ensure adequate capacity, performance and speeds so that consumers and businesses can rely on us for all of their personal and professional mobile voice and data needs,” said Brian Caraway, general manager of C Spire’s wireless unit, in a prepared statement. “We have added carriers at these sites that, in most cases, have doubled capacity and tripled speeds – depending on the need.”
Alan Jones, senior vice president of access and deployment for C Spire, added: “We’re using carrier aggregation technology, which brings together spectrum from multiple frequency bands for improved speed and spectral efficiency, and other software and hardware improvements to achieve better speeds and pave the way for Voice over LTE or high-definition mobile voice service coming soon.”
C Spire’s concluded work in the state includes:
- Northeast Mississippi (three counties and 29 sites)
- East Central Mississippi (9 counties and 64 sites)
- Central Mississippi (two counties and 8 sites)
- The Delta (13 counties and 53 sites)
- Southwest Mississippi (7 counties and 31 sites)
- The Pine Belt (four counties and 51 sites)
- Gulf Coast (three counties and 16 sites)
