CDMA is unique, thankfully in this case - you can put up a single CDMA carrier on a shared frequency in a market and cover the whole of the market - CDMA works

CDMA is unique, thankfully in this case - you can put up a single CDMA carrier on a shared frequency in a market and cover the whole of the market - CDMA works fine when doing a same channel/same channel handover. Essentially, with say, 2.5 MHz you could cover a whole market with a single CDMA carrier, and 1-2 GSM carriers, the sprint equipment at least is designed to do both CDMA and LTE with one hardware set - the gear that t-mobile uses is more modular, so it's even easier to leave the legacy bearers up for the long tail.