Over the past few years T-Mobile US has taken a number of steps to increase its competitiveness in the country's LTE market. For this purpose, it rolled out 2 channel carrier aggregation back in 2014 and has since rolled out 3 channel carrier aggregation as well for even faster data speeds. These advanced network technologies are available to T-Mobile customers in more than 425 cities across the United States who experience typical download speeds of 7-40 Mbps.
T-Mobile announced yesterday that it was amping up its LTE network technology yet again to provide a 2x speed boost. The 4×4 MIMO technology basically doubles the number of data paths between a cell site and a compatible smartphone which results in double the speed. T-Mobile has rolled out 4×4 MIMO in 319 cities across the country and currently the only devices that support it are the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge.
The Galaxy Note 7 has support for 4×4 MIMO on T-Mobile as well. Those who own the Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 edge on T-Mobile will receive a software update later this month which will enable them to take advantage of faster LTE speeds and T-Mobile will later roll out this update to more handsets.
The carrier has also launched 256 QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) technology which increases the number of bits delivered per transmission to provide even faster speeds. When combined with 4×4 MIMO it provides download speeds of up to 400 Mbps. This technology will be supported on every single T-Mobile cell site across the United States by the end of next month. Again, the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge will be the first devices to get support for 256 QAM via a software update in October.
