Editor’s Note: I know the camera work is a little shaky, I had to do a balancing act with my laptop and taking notes so I’m sorry it’s not the best!
T-Mobile showed off a little bit of their upcoming 42Mbps HSPA+ network by doing exactly what I would do to test it and that is to download an album and play a video game. Honestly, if you’re a computer gaming person, the frame rates in the Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit game will most certainly impress you and make you question if that’s really coming out of mobile broadband. We took not 1, not 2, but 3 videos of T-Mobile testing out the network so watch them, enjoy them and then hope you’re city is at the top of the launch list!
A couple of notes:
- T-Mobile hopes that 2/3 of their existing network will see 42Mbps HSPA+ speeds in 2011 and work is already in progress.
- Theoretical speeds of 42Mbps but likely speeds of ~ 25Mbps, which we’ll take. Yeah, we’ll take 25Mbps very nicely!
- The demo device was a ZTE webConnect Rocket 3.0 device that will be among the first devices to take advantage of the new speeds.
- T-Mobile believes that 42Mbps HSPA+ will continue to place it in a “leadership position” among the competition with the fastest network available.
- HSPA+ growth will grow significantly more than LTE in the next 4 years and will be achieved with less infrastructure costs which in turn leads to the notion that T-Mobile won’t be looking to charge a premium for data.
- The current 4G network is 160% large than Verizon’s LTE and 40% bigger than Sprint’s Wimax.
- 900K 4G devices have been sold so far to customers.
- The average T-Mobile customer uses 1GB of data per month.