By Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
T-Mobile has started the rollout of its new 5G tech that can deliver speeds of up to 3.3Gbps using carrier aggregation, which combines four different 5G channels into one for devices that can handle it (only Samsung’s newer Galaxy S23 phones at the moment), similar to a trick used by Wi-Fi routers to create a faster connection.
That’s even faster than what you’d get out of mmWave 5G, which is more heavily touted by Verizon and AT&T as also being capable of extremely high speeds — Ookla recently reported download speeds of up to 1.6Gbps in the US. However, it has limited range and device support and is easily hampered by common impediments like trees and buildings.
The four channels T-Mobile is using include repurposed 1,900MHz spectrum…