US operators battle for pole Gigabit LTE position, but mostly in the lab, not the real world, so far.
Ahead of Mobile World Congress Americas next week, US operators are eagerly claiming to be the fastest with Gigabit LTE speeds, at least in lab tests.
T-Mobile US Inc. said Friday that it has achieved "a record" 1.175 Gbit/s in a lab test with Qualcomm Inc. (Nasdaq: QCOM) This beats Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ)'s previous US best of 1.07 Gbit/s in the lab. (See Verizon & Friends Bust Through Gigabit LTE in the Lab.)
See the video from T-Mobile here:
Want to learn more about Gigabit LTE? Join us for our FREE LTE Advanced Pro and Gigabit LTE: The Path to 5G breakfast event taking place at Mobile World Congress Americas on September 13 at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, Moscone Center in San Francisco. Register today!
T-Mobile says the test used the now-usual palette of technologies to achieve the speeds, including:
Nokia "4.9G" powered by an AirScale basestation
A Snapdragon X20 LTE modem mobile test device, supporting downlink LTE Category 18 for theoretical peak download speeds up to 1.2 Gbit/s
12 independent streams of LTE data
4x4 MIMO, 256 QAM and three-carrier aggregation across 60MHz of downlink spectrum on T-Mobile's network
So how relevant is this to an actual user? Well, Qualcomm has previously said that a user with a compatible device will get between 100 Mbit/s and 300 Mbit/s on a real-world network. (See When Is a Gig Not a Gig? When It's Gigabit LTE!)
The whole push towards faster speeds and lower latencies on mobile 4G networks, however, could give some users pause about a switch-over to 5G as that arrives in 2018 and 2019. Especially as much of the early hype around 5G is concerned with fixed services, particularly in the US.
— Dan Jones, Mobile Editor, Light Reading
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