Actually, no. LTE Towers are new Multi-Mode towers popping up. These towers will support LTE and 3G as well as WiMax where it is already available. Essentially, your phone will pick up the different frequencies depending on coverage. If you are to far from the tower you will be switched to the lowest frequency to improve coverage, but speed will be slower. The closer you are, the highest freq. you will pick including LTE and WiMax or just plain old 3G. Unfortunately, like others have said before me, LTE is a hardware requirement, not a software code. You cannot force it to work on LTE unless you redesign the phone phone itself, internally anyways.
Still, Sprint has to sell all of it's Nextel towers to gain a little revenue to pursue expansion of the new towers. Yes, Nextel is being phased out. At this point, Sprint will produce very few LTE towers at a time to the point, again like other people said, you will probably have better coverage with 3G or WiMax than the new LTE towers.
Source? I'm a Sprint Tech.
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