Sprint Increases Its LTE Footprint

Never even heard of half these places. Lawrence Kansas? Waukegan-Lake County? Barnstable-Hyannis/Mid-Cape? Why the hell is Sprint deploying LTE in places that people never even heard of? It seems Sprint is deploying in areas that arent even their network, and are on affiliate networks first, or at least places that never even had 3G and were still running 1xRTT.
If Sprint is saying they are improving 3G network performance in the nations three largest cities, I hope that means, capacity capacity capacity, backhaul backhaul backhaul and not "oh we just deployed 850ESMR so ya'll be good to go" - cause MOST customers, something like 95% of them still dont have 850ESMR capable phones to experience what Sprint has notoriously called "improved network performance" with the Network Vision deployment.
So I really hope its smaller cells, added capacity, 1x-Advanced overlay and backhaul to the sites they are claiming to have improved network performance rather than just opening up a sliver of another frequency.