C Spire Boosts Mobile Broadband Speeds, Capacity in Four Pine Belt Counties

Firm adds critical wireless spectrum, carriers to 51 cell sites to improve customer network experience

Ridgeland, Miss. (November 20, 2019) – Consumers and businesses in parts of C Spire’s wireless service area in the Mississippi Pine Belt are experiencing faster speeds and better connections with the completion of a 10-month project to deploy more spectrum and add capacity to the network.

The multi-million-dollar project, which started in February and is virtually complete this month, targeted 51 cell sites in four Pine Belt counties and 252 cell sites in 41 counties statewide for the enhancements, which have improved capacity and speeds for thousands of customers as a result of the additional spectrum and carriers.

C Spire, a Mississippi-based telecommunications and technology services company, operates the nation’s largest privately-owned mobile services firm. The targeted program is part of the firm’s broader efforts to strengthen its core network and prepare for the next generation of cellular technology.

The spectrum project comes on the heels of a separate, massive company effort to install new base stations and software at all of its 1,200-plus cell sites that will serve as the foundation for C Spire’s transition to 5G, which promises to radically alter how consumers live, work and play and how businesses thrive in the new 21st century digital economy.

“As a customer-inspired company, we are constantly fine tuning our network to ensure adequate capacity, performance and speeds so that consumers and businesses in the Pine Belt and across our region 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.

Caraway said the company has used some of its supply of low and mid-band spectrum and added capacity and carriers where needed to improve speeds and connections. “We have added carriers at these sites that, in many cases, have doubled capacity and tripled speeds – depending on the need,” he noted.

Much of the work in the Pine Belt has improved the performance of 51 cell sites, including:

• Eight Covington County cell sites where low-band spectrum was doubled, resulting in improved capacity and speed for virtually all company cell sites in the county
• 23 Jones County cell sites where low and mid-band spectrum was doubled, resulting in capacity and speed improvements, especially data speeds in Laurel.
• 12 Marion County cell sites where low-band spectrum was doubled, resulting in capacity and speed improvements, particularly in and around Columbia.
• Eight Wayne County cell sites where low-band spectrum additions and mid-band capacity boosts coupled with the addition of high-band spectrum has improved capacity and speed, especially in Waynesboro where the high-band addition has resulted in dramatically higher data speeds.

“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,” said Alan Jones, senior vice president of Access and Deployment for C Spire.

The pre-5G project features new base stations and radios that are adaptable, powerful and able to meet C Spire’s future needs for a next generation cellular network, software-defined services and the Internet of Things. “Not only does this new technology deliver high quality connectivity and coverage, but it helps us quickly evolve to meet customer expectations,” Jones said. To learn more about the C Spire network enhancements, visit www.cspire.com/cms/wireless/enhanced-network-speeds/.

C Spire
C Spire is a diversified telecommunications and technology services company that provides world-class, customer-inspired wireless communications, 1 Gigabit consumer Internet access as well as a full suite of dedicated Internet, wireless, IP Voice, data and cloud services for businesses. This news release and other announcements are available at www.cspire.com/news. For more information www.facebook.com/cspire">about C Spire, visit www.cspire.com or follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/cspire or Twitter at www.twitter.com/cspire.