5G is pretty fast, but everyone wants even faster connectivity. Carrier Aggregation (abbreviated as CA) is a special way to achieve that. All carriers use some form of CA in the US, including T-Mobile. The company has now announced that they have begun 4xCA over 5G signals for the first time.
Carrier aggregation allows you to connect to multiple frequency bands, or carriers, simultaneously to boost bandwidth, speeds, and general network performance. Now, T-Mobile is going all-in with 5G four-carrier aggregation—and the speed gains the carrier is promising are looking quite enticing.
In case you’re not familiar with the term, four-carrier aggregation is pretty much what it sounds like it is. It allows for connecting to up to four channels in an effort to boost connectivity.
In T-Mobile’s case, as the company announced, it’s merging four channels of sub-6 GHz spectrum to greatly improve connection speeds — to be specific, if your phone is capable, you’ll be connecting to two channels of 2.5 GHz “Ultra Capacity” 5G (which is band n41), one channel of 1,900 MHz (band n25), and one channel of 600 MHz spectrum (that one’s the long-range band n71).
As we mentioned, this will greatly improve speeds. But by how much, exactly? In a nutshell, a lot. Probably faster than the home internet in most households, actually.
In recent tests, T-Mobile says that it has reached peak speeds of 3.3 Gbps. While this is not a guarantee that you’ll get those speeds, you should still expect really, really fast speeds if you’re taking advantage of four-carrier aggregation.
Right now, the new 4xCA is available for a number of users in T-Mobile’s network, and the carrier says the feature will be rolled out nationwide in the coming weeks. We don’t have a timeline of which other phones will get it, and when they’ll get it, but if you’re a Galaxy S23 user and you notice a sudden and wild increase in speeds, now you’ll know why.
