NYU WIRELESS and Sprint today announced they are working together to further the development of mobile 5G. Sprint joins the university research center at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering as an industry affiliate sponsor.

As an industry affiliate, Sprint will gain early access to NYU WIRELESS’s internationally recognized research, work with students and faculty on 5G-oriented projects, and have access to a ready pipeline of engineering talent. Sprint will also contribute technical expertise on network design, use cases, and architecture requirements for core and radio access 5G networks and the devices that will access them.

Sprint continues to make progress on its path to 5G. Together with Qualcomm Technologies and SoftBank, it recently agreed to develop technologies for mobile 5G, including the 3GPP New Radio (NR) standard in Band 41 (2.5 GHz) for accelerated wide-scale 5G deployments. The companies plan to provide commercial services and devices in late 2019. The announcement builds on Sprint’s demonstration last summer, when it was the first carrier in the world to showcase 5G at a large scale public event — the Copa America Centenario soccer tournament — using 15 GHz and 73 GHz spectrum.

“We’re focused on delivering mobile 5G in late 2019 using our 2.5 GHz spectrum to provide broad nationwide 5G coverage with millimeter wave bands serving as high-capacity, high-throughput hotspots,” said Dr. Ron Marquardt, Vice President of Technology, Sprint. “Our work with NYU WIRELESS will be instrumental for practical use of this spectrum and ensuring strong integration between these bands.”

NYU WIRELESS is a recognized international academic leader in 5G research for its seminal mmWave research, measuring, and modeling. The center, which conducted the world’s first radio channel measurements proving that the mmWave spectrum holds vast potential to improve wireless communications, was cited by the Federal Communications Commission when the commission explored the future of millimeter technology. NYU WIRELESS’s Founding Director Theodore “Ted” Rappaport’s expertise was a key element in the FCC’s 2016 passage of the Spectrum Frontiers Proposal (SFP), and NYU WIRELESS is one of only two academic institutions recently chosen by the FCC to help test, debug, and provide feedback on a new web-based portal that lets researchers apply for a program experimental license. Through its 18 affiliates and its co-sponsorship of the Brooklyn 5G Summit, NYU WIRELESS is playing a key role in driving commercialization of next-generation technology and services.

“We very much look forward to working closely with Sprint. Dating from their work in developing 4G, Sprint has had a well-known reputation of being technology pioneers, trialing advanced technologies in very early stages” said Sundeep Rangan, the director of NYU WIRELESS and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at NYU Tandon. “Our research collaboration has the potential to take the 5G technologies from the lab to a real operator. This work can ultimately benefit wireless consumers with vastly increased speed and connectivity and to transform the communications landscape of the future.”