T-Mobile US announced it's the first national mobile operator to make LTE-U available to customers in the US. T-Mobile LTE-U is live in select locations in Bellevue, WA; Brooklyn, NY; Dearborn, MI; Las Vegas, NV; Richardson, TX; and Simi Valley, CA, with more rolling out later in 2017.
In addition, the company completed a mobile broadband data session live in the field using license assisted access (LAA) on its commercial network. The field testing, which began in Los Angeles on 25 June, showed 741 Mbps download speeds using 80 MHz of aggregated spectrum.
LTE-U makes use of unlicensed spectrum in the 5 GHz band, normally used for Wi-Fi services, to boost the capacity of LTE networks. LAA is a similar technology developed by Ericsson to make use of the unlicensed spectrum bands. In February, the FCC authorised the first devices for LTE in the 5 GHz band.
