Fast Internet connection in the US is not a luxury anymore but a necessity for a lot of people. Probably each carrier will claim that they have the fastest data connection in the country. T-Mobile, the 3rd largest in the US, is no exception and they have now announced a partnership with Qualcomm Technologies, to bring Gigabit Class LTE to their network. The next generation of LTE, the “contentious” LTE Advanced is also now available in more than 920 markets. They also plan to launch License Assisted Access (LAA) soon.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Gigabit LTE modems are the support that T-Mobile needed in order to bring LTE Advanced to go live in 430 more markets, to reach the 900+ mark. They are using three speed-boosting technologies to be able to do this, including carrier aggregation, 4X4 MIMO and 256 QAM. If you get LTE-A in your area, ideally you will get double your usual download speeds and if you have the aforementioned three technologies, then you get another double speed. We say ideally of course because as we all know, it doesn’t always happen in real life.
The Gigabit LTE is actually preparing networks and consumers for the future 5G, which is still a few years far off but hopefully will arrive eventually. T-Mobile also revealed their plans to launch LAA which basically taps into the unlicensed spectrum in order to “further densify the network for even more capacity and speed”.
While all of these things sound good, regular consumers of course will only understand it if they feel that their Internet speeds are significantly faster. If you’re a T-Mobile subscriber, have you already felt the effect of LTE Advanced in your area?
SOURCE: T-Mobile
