U.S. Cellular recently talked about plans to expand the availability of its LTE 4G network from 94% of customers today to 98% of customers by the end of the year.
In order to do that, it will deploy about 600 new cell sites and increase coverage across portions of California, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia.
The company believes increasing its 4G footprint will help reduce churn. The company operates LTE in the 700MHz band through a partnership with King Street Wireless. U.S. Cellular says about 61% of its customers have LTE-enabled devices, and 78% of its data transits the LTE network.
As far as advanced features go, U.S. Cellular is testing VoLTE, but has no timeframe for deploying that or other tools, such as carrier aggregation.
