Sprint customers can get a free Magic Box for better LTE coverage

Sprint customers who feel they don’t get a good signal at their house can now ask to get a free Magic Box. Yes, that is the name that the carrier is using for its new LTE signal extender, and it hopes that its use by individuals and businesses will help improve its overall network.

Sprint says the Magic Box is about the size of a shoebox, and can be installed by anyone within minutes. When placed near a window, the Magic Box will connect to a Sprint cell site, and can extend its LTE signal to cover up to 30,000 square feet of indoor space. It can also extend the signal outdoors by about 100 meters.

Sprint says it has already deployed the Magic Box in a number of metro areas in the US, including Denver, San Francisco, Indianapolis, New York, Chicago, and Houston. It claims that download speeds in those cities “significantly improved”, with the help of those signal extenders, alongside other new outdoor small cells, and the use of three-channel carrier aggregation on its network.

If you want to get one of these Magic Boxes for your home or business, you can go to Sprint’s website to see if you qualify. If you do get one, and then later decide you don’t want to use the box anymore, you can ship it back to Sprint, again at no cost. The carrier says it will continue to make improvements to its network, including future plans to support four-channel carrier aggregation, 256 QAM, 4×4 MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) and Massive MIMO.