Motorola's upcoming flagship running on Snapdragon 835 processor showcased

The company is proudly proclaiming that it is the very first carrier to deploy Gigabit Class LTE on a commercial network.

The carrier on Wednesday showcased its gigabit capabilities in New Orleans, using 4x4 MIMO, 256-QAM, and three-carrier aggregation to deliver speeds well into the 600 Mbps range on a single Motorola prototype device during a network-taxing National Basketball Association game in the Smoothie King arena.

The X16 LTE modem found inside the Snapdragon 835 supports 4 x 4 MIMO and 4x carrier aggregation even in weak signal conditions, so the same list of features can also be expected to be present in this unnamed Motorola smartphone. They plan to utilize massive MIMO for their 2.5 GHz spectrum holdings, which they claim will push their bandwidth capabilities into the 3 -6 Gbps range.

Sprint may be the fourth-place US wireless carrier and panned for its spotty nationwide coverage, but the company is already laying the groundwork to boost its LTE network to gigabit speeds. This could take some time, since most now available smartphones do not support these technologies.

It was, according to the company's announcement, "the first USA deployment of gigabit class LTE live on a commercial network with a forthcoming flagship premium tier smartphone". This was impressive, especially at the Smoothie King Center during a live game when it would be reasonable to expect short-form video data traffic along with other multimedia data traffic.

Speeds will increase significantly, with a noticeable difference for end subscribers, but at scale, Sprint will not be delivering a gigabit to every handset.

But it appears Sprint's march to gigabit LTE is already well underway. Since launching Sprint Spark in 2014, the operator has employed several technologies to improve its network performance end-to-end in different phases over the past four years including launching Sprint LTE Plus. The phone used technology from Qualcomm that will be available in other handsets in the future, said Günther Ottendorfer, Sprint's chief operating officer for technology. Motorola will debut the production version of this smartphone most likely sometime later this year for use on Sprint's network.

Source: Motorola's upcoming flagship running on Snapdragon 835 processor showcased