T-Mobile’s senior Vice President of technology, strategy, finance and development, Dave Mayo, has said that the carrier will debut its LTE-Advanced features later this year. Dave didn’t exactly say what he meant by “features,” and also didn’t provide a concrete time-frame in which the carrier might unveil its LTE-A offering.
LTE-A update generally includes carrier aggregation techniques that bonds together multiple radio frequencies to offer faster data speeds. Its supposed to offer twice the speeds of 4G LTE, and while a 100 percent improvement is just theoretical, LTE-A will definitely tout significant gains over LTE. The only LTE-A compatible device out there right now is the “faster” Galaxy S4 that was officially announced earlier today. Though for now it is only available in South Korea, where SK Telecom will be switching on its LTE-A network in the near future. LG is expected to come out with its own device compatible with this standard towards the end of 2013. Obviously for the network to be of any real benefit, compatible devices have to be available to customers first. It remains to be seen when other U.S. carriers plan on rolling out their own LTE-A networks, AT&T will reportedly deploy its network this year as well.
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