T-Mobile announced that it has deployed new technology that will boost the LTE speeds of subscribers to as fast as 400 Mbps, and in the same breath, blasted rival Verizon's recently unveiled LTE Advanced.
The first piece of technology that T-Mobile rolled out is called "multiple input, multiple output," or MIMO for short. The company said that it is the first carrier to roll it out, and that the technology will double the number of data paths available between the smartphones of users and cellular sites.
MIMO is now available to customers across 319 cities. Unfortunately, the only smartphones that will be ready to use the technology are Samsung's Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge, through a software update that will be released within the month. More smartphones will soon support the technology, T-Mobile promised.
The second piece of technology is 256 QAM for downloads and 64 QAM for uploads. QAM stands for quadrature amplitude modulation, and the new technology will increase the number of bits being delivered during transmissions to further improve speed.
The new QAM technology has already been launched for half of the carrier's network, with the remaining cell sites to receive it by the end of October. Unfortunately, only the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge are poised to take advantage of the technology through a software update to be released next month, with support for other smartphones to follow.
The two technologies combined will allow subscribers to enjoy LTE speeds of up to 400 Mbps, T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray said in the press release announcing them. In the same statement, Ray blasted Verizon and its so-called LTE Advanced, which promises speeds of up to 300 Mbps.
According to Ray, the channel aggregation that LTE Advanced uses has already been rolled out by T-Mobile, with two-channel aggregation already available for the carrier's subscribers since 2014 and three-channel aggregation also already implemented.
Ray added that while Verizon has invested massive amounts of money into its network reaching billions of dollars, the company's network is still slower than T-Mobile's. In addition, Verizon is still not offering customers true unlimited data plans.
The reason behind the decision of Verizon, as well as AT&T, to not offer unlimited high-speed data is simply because their networks will not be able to handle such a load. The networks of T-Mobile's rivals were not built to handle the data load that people utilize today, Ray said, while T-Mobile's network was built with the massive data usage of subscribers in mind.
The rivalry between carriers continues to heat up, and while T-Mobile seems to be pulling ahead, you can be sure that its competitors will not be silent after these latest statements.
