Qualcomm and T-Mobile spread Gigabit LTE to 430 markets, LTE-A in 920+ markets

Noah Stahl | Nov 9 2017 - 11:09 am PT

At an event in San Jose today, Qualcomm Technologies company, partnered with T-Mobile, demonstrated their latest step in the evolution of LTE. T-Mobile announced that LTE Advanced, which is the newest generation, and supported by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Gigabit LTE modems, is now live in 430 markets.

The Un-carrier announced that LTE Advanced, the next generation of LTE, has expanded to more than 920 markets, eclipsing every other national wireless company, with a powerful combination of three speed-boosting technologies – carrier aggregation, 4X4 MIMO and 256 QAM – now live in 430 of those markets.

According to T-Mobile, with LTE Advanced, you can expect double your former download speeds. On top of that, using a combination of carrier aggregation, 4X4 MIMO, and 256 QAM, you could see speeds double again. T-Mobile claims that they can reach such speeds because of two factors, the upgrades they’ve made to the network and the new Snapdragon Gigabit LTE modems supplied by Qualcomm. Some of the markets, 430 of them, will see the fastest speeds possible because of this combination.

Neville Ray, Chief Technology Officer for T-Mobile said this about the roll out:

This is what I’m talking about when I say T-Mobile has America’s best unlimited network and the only one purpose-built for unlimited. Not only do we have a nationwide LTE footprint that’s every bit as broad as the Duopoly’s, and the fastest according to multiple third parties — it also keeps getting faster. Gigabit Class LTE technology is part of the secret sauce behind our success – and why others are struggling under the weight of unlimited – and we’re only continuing to advance with LAA on the horizon.

LLA is short for License Assisted Access, which taps into unlicensed spectrum and will be used to bolster the network for greater traffic. T-Mobile pioneered LLA’s precursor with LTE-U earlier this year.

The biggest impact that Gigabit LTE will have is preparing networks and consumers for the inevitable jump to 5G. Although that may be a bit in the future, this creates a good starting point for the move forward.

Some of the benefits outlined by demonstrators were things like greater network capacity, super fast downloads of media, and almost instant access to files stored in the cloud.