T-Mobile today teamed up with Qualcomm to show off the potential of its super-fast gigabit LTE network.
T-Mobile's next-generation LTE Advanced, which has been in the works for several years, has now expanded to more than 920 markets, the carrier announced at an event in San Jose. In 430 of those markets, T-Mobile customers with supported devices could potentially get Gigabit Class LTE download speeds.
Together with Qualcomm, T-Mobile demoed LTE advances using a Samsung Galaxy S8, which runs Qualcomm's gigabit LTE modem; it reached peak download speeds of around 670 Mbps.
In another demo, T-Mobile had five Google Daydream virtual reality headsets connected to phones running over its gigabit LTE network. Each streamed 3D clips of NBA games at 4K and there was no slowdown at all.
T-Mobile customers in the 430 gigabit markets (here's the full list) could experience similar download speeds, though network conditions will vary. So, not exactly 1Gbps, but still a sizeable leap over many existing download speeds; customers could download a Netflix movie or share photos online in just seconds.
It's also not 5G, which T-Mobile expects to start arriving in 2019.
As PCMag's Sascha Segan explained earlier this year, Gigabit LTE requires a bunch of technologies that have to be turned on both by the handset manufacturer and the wireless carrier. In the US, a phone needs to support at least three-channel carrier aggregation, which bonds together different slices of spectrum to make one broad highway. It needs four-branch antenna diversity and four physical antennas laid into the phone to support 4x4 MIMO, which boosts the capacity of a connection. And it needs 256QAM down and 64QAM up, advanced forms of encoding that can pack more bits into a radio pulse.
So far, 10 Android smartphones—including the Galaxy S8, Note 8, Moto Z2 Force Edition, and LG V30—have modems that can use the gigabit LTE. But Qualcomm expects more vendors to build the technology into their upcoming devices.
Source: https://www.pcmag.com/news/357279/t-mobile-expands-gigabit-lte-push-to-430-markets
