T-Mobile demos nearly 1Gbps speeds on its LTE network with unreleased phone

With more and more people buying smartphones, wireless carriers continue to try to out-promote each other with claims of faster download speeds on their networks in order to get new customers. Today, T-Mobile released its annual update on its own coverage, which included a video that showed the company getting nearly 1Gbps of download speeds on its current network.

The post about the network update was written by T-Mobile’s chief technology officer Neville Ray. He said the video shown above was taken in the company’s labs with an unrevealed, and currently unreleased, smartphone. The company was able to get download speeds to that phone as high as 979 Mbps on its current LTE network, through the use of three carrier aggregation, 4×4 MIMO and 256 QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation). Ray claimed that T-Mobile will be the first carrier in the US to offer 1Gbps speeds to its customers, and added that even more improvements are coming in the future.

Ray also offered T-Mobile’s thoughts on future 5G networks. He admits that it will still be “several more years” before those kinds of networks are widely available to smartphone owners. However, he did state that the company has already been testing for that future with “mobile speeds of 1.8 Gbps, fixed speeds of 12 Gbps with latency under 2 milliseconds, 8×8 MIMO and four simultaneous 4K video streams.” In the video shown above, T-Mobile offers a possible future based on 5G network speeds, with mobile augmented reality apps that will allow customers to have instant voice translations with people with other languages, a better way to shop for clothes and much more.

Ray also revealed that T-Mobile’s LTE network now reaches 313 million people in the US, which he says is close to Verizon Wireless’ network reach of 314 million people. In addition, Ray added that the company’s Extended Range LTE support is now available for over 250 million people to access in more than 500 metro areas. Finally, he said that 64 percent of all calls on the network use its Voice over LTE (VoLTE) support, compared to just 40 percent at the end of 2015.

T-Mobile’s next big announcement is coming next week, as the company plans to reveal yet another “Un-carrier” feature, or more, on Thursday, January 5 at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.