For much of the last year Sprint insiders have been telling us that Sprint absolutely is making the jump to LTE, despite half-hearted protestations from Sprint CEO Dan Hesse. Not only is Sprint going LTE, but the company is working on a massive deal with Lightsquared we exclusively reported last week that would involve Lightsquared piggybacking on Sprint's $5 billion LTE base station retrofit by Alcatel-Lucent, Ericcson and Samsung.

At this point leaks surrounding this LTE shift are popping up from sources inside all of the companies involved. The latest leak comes courtesy of GizmoFusion, which cites yet more sources that claim Sprint's LTE shift is currently underway. As previous reports have suggested, Sprint will initially run a hybrid network -- with iDen, EVDO, Mobile WiMax and LTE all live at the same time:

Sprint currently has 800Mhz iDen, 1900Mhz CDMA, and 2500Mhz WiMax and they plan on combining all services on all forms of spectrum. For example if in NY 800Mhz works best to complete a call or establish data then a device compatible with the new network would use 800Mhz. If 1900Mhz is less crowded and works fine, it will use that, and so on....LTE is absolutely going into this plan and they will put LTE on their 800Mhz network when possible.

The website notes that Sprint is calling this shift "Project Leapfrog," while sources previously informed us Sprint's Clearwire contingency plan is called "Project Freedom." This massive shift in strategy is likely directly tied to the mass exodus of Clearwire executives that occurred last week. Again, some or all of this strategy could be officially unveiled next week at CTIA, where LTE is set to play the starring role.