T-Mobile US said that it has passed gigabit speeds with LTE, together with Nokia and Qualcomm, in a world first. The tests were recently held at T-Mobile’s lab, reaching download speeds of 1.175 Gbps on the operator’s LTE network, using Nokia’s 4.9G network powered by the Nokia AirScale Base Station together with the Snapdragon X20 LTE modem. The modem supports Downlink Category 18 for theoretical peak download speeds up to 1.2 Gbps. The tests also used 12 independent streams of LTE data and 4X4 MIMO, 256 QAM and three carrier aggregation across 60 MHz of downlink spectrum on T-Mobile’s network.
Quacomm Technologies executive VP Cristiano Amo noted that user devices supporting these speeds should be made commercially available in the first half of 2018.
Using the 12 simultaneous independent LTE data streams between the device and network enables a theoretical peak download speed of 1.2 Gbps. T-Mobile US CTO Neville said the tests showed that commercially available 4G technologies can go much beyond what customers experience today, as operators look further and prepare for 5G.
Nokia and Qualcomm Technologies will demonstrate the 1.2Gbps data rates at Mobile World Congress Americas 2017 in San Francisco, on 12-14 September.