Sprint revealed Kansas City will get the 5G treatment, adding the operator’s home turf to a list of nine cities which will be part of its next generation network launch in the second half of 2019.

Kansas City joins six other launch locations announced by the operator in February: Atlanta, Georgia; Chicago, Illinois; Dallas and Houston, Texas; Los Angeles, California; and Washington, DC.

Two other launch cities remain unnamed. But a Sprint representative told Mobile World Live the operator is focused on locations where it has a large customer base, a “critical mass” of 2.5GHz cell sites and the spectrum necessary to execute its 5G plan.

Duelling launches
Several of Sprint’s 5G launch cities overlap with those named by other leading US operators for their own next generation deployments.

AT&T said it would begin rolling out 5G in Atlanta, Georgia; and Dallas and Waco, Texas by the end of this year. Meanwhile, T-Mobile US lined up New York City; Los Angeles; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Dallas as its 5G starting points.

Verizon, however, has kept fairly mum about its initial launch locations. The operator said it plans to deploy fixed wireless access 5G in three to five markets by the end of this year, but only named one of those: Sacramento, California.