Last week Verizon Wireless made a big deal about its activation of two- and three-channel carrier aggregation in more than 450 markets. In response, T-Mobile US CTO Neville Ray wrote a blog post essentially calling the Verizon Wireless play a marketing move.
Ray wrote that he was “cracking up” at the Verizon Wireless news. He said two-channel carrier aggregation has been available to T-Mobile US customers since 2014 and that the carrier has brought three-channel carrier aggregation live as well.
“It’s a big reason T-Mobile has been crushing the competition in LTE speeds for years,” Ray wrote, citing OpenSignal, Ookla and the Federal Communications Commission.
“I will hand it to Verizon. They did some cool marketing. And, I really can’t blame them for trumpeting LTE Advanced two years too late. This is what they have to do with their older, slower network. Every couple years, they rebrand it. Remember Verizon XLTE? It’s all but gone. Now, it’s Verizon LTE-A. What’s next? Verizon LTE-BS?”
Ray called the whole thing “a great big yawn.”
He went on to tout that T-Mobile US has introduced 4×4 multiple-input and multiple-output in 319 cities and that subs who have (unexploded) Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge devices can take advantage of increased data speeds after a software update that will be pushed later this month.
Ray said T-Mobile US also has launched 256 quadrature amplitude modulation for downloads and 64 QAM for uploads. Taken with 4×4 MIMO, he said peak data rates are up to 400 megabits per second.
