Earlier today, T-Mobile’s President of Technology, Neville Ray, hoped on Reddit to answer some 5G questions. It was his first Reddit AMA and he was asked some really interesting questions. 

One of the questions thrown at him was about standalone 5G and 5G carrier aggregation. And as shared by The T-Mo Report, Ray confirmed NR CA (New Radio Carrier Aggregation) will be rolling out by the end of the year and into next year. The technology will kick off on the latest iPhone 13 series.  

“We’re on track to begin delivering NR CA to more customers by the end of this year. The next phase of NR CA will focus on increasing our 2.5 GHz mid-band spectrum beyond 100 MHz. With N41 channels of 120-140 MHz, customers will experience a significant boost in throughput. This capability will initially be available to customers with iPhone 13 and will expand to additional devices in Q1.” – Neville Ray

Carrier aggregation refers to a network device’s ability to connect and use two or more connection bands simultaneously. In T-Mo’s case, its LTE network regularly does CA between its bands 2, 4, 12, 66, and 71 connections. As a result, users get increased throughput and bandwidth on their phones.

In T-Mo’s testing, they were able to reach a speed of more than 1,000 Mbps using a combination of n41 and n71 connection. The interesting thing about this is that they conducted the test on an LG Velvet 5G. Once the Un-carrier adds these two connections to its 5G network, customers can expect even higher speeds than the one they are already exposed to. 

During the AMA, Ray revealed that they have already started rolling out this network feature. They also plan to continue rolling out the feature until the end of 2022. The iPhone 13 models will only be the first series of phones to have 5G NR CA. They intend to enable this feature to other devices by Q1 2022. 

Source: The T-Mo Report