T-Mobile 4G LTE tests being run in Kansas?
Back at CES, T-Mobile announced that its very first 4G LTE city would go live. Las Vegas was the city to get that love, of course, considering that’s where the tech world converged for close to a week, but some recent evidence suggests Kansas may be next up to bat. An XDA member in Wichita was able to get his Band 4-compatible Galaxy Note (the original) up on an LTE network that seems to be in testing by T-Mobile. The speeds don’t look great — 10k kilobits down to 5k kilobits up, just about — but that’s not important here.
What’s important is that T-Mobile has reached a stage where it’s comfortable with lighting a signal up for the purposes of testing the many different variables of network technology, and that we’re getting closer and closer to an onslaught of launches for Magenta. By the time this thing goes live and some devices are released to actually take advantage of the network we should see those speeds increase ten-fold.
While T-Mobile might be behind the rest of the pack in terms of rollouts and device launches, the company is expected to be very aggressive and get a majority of its current 3G footprint covered by the end of 2013. T-Mobile will also look to have the first major LTE upgrades to make their network compliant with the standards set in the 3GPP Release 10 document. We’ll have to wait and see just how much of an improvement that turns out to be over current Release 9-compliant deployments.
Unfortunately there’s still a lot of work to be done so we can’t say when, exactly, T-Mobile expects a full-on launch. Devices should be rolling in starting at some point in Q2, though, with a full suite of products ready to chow down on LTE goodness starting in the second half of this year.
[XDA Developers via TmoNews]