T-Mobile announced on June 26 it had completed the United States' first 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, showed blazing 741 Mbps download speeds using 80 MHz of aggregated spectrum.

Oscilloquartz, an ADVA Optical Networking company, announced today that T-Mobile Netherlands has deployed and fully implemented its OSA 5420 Series, enabling the nationwide rollout of TD-LTE services.

T-Mobile recently announced plans to roll-out its new 600MHz LTE network in the US, leveraging the massive haul of super-premium low-band spectrum the operator won in the government broadcast incentive auction concluded earlier this year. The announcement came just two months after the company received its spectrum licenses from the FCC.

T-Mobile, Qualcomm and Nokia achieved an industry first by exceeding Gigabit speeds using evolved, commercially-available 4G LTE. In tests at T-Mobile's lab in early September, download speeds of 1.175Gbps were achieved on T-Mobile's LTE network utilizing Nokia's 4.9G network powered by the Nokia AirScale Base Station and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X20 LTE modem.

T-Mobile and Nokia announced a landmark $3.5 billion agreement to accelerate the deployment of a nationwide 5G network. Nokia will provide T-Mobile with its complete end-to-end 5G technology, software and services portfolio, assisting the Un-carrier in its efforts to bring its 5G network to market for customers in the critical first years of the 5G cycle.

As they say, the third time is a charm! T-Mobile and Sprint tell us they have entered into a definitive agreement to merge in an all-stock transaction at a fixed exchange ratio of 0.10256 T-Mobile shares for each Sprint share or the equivalent of 9.75 Sprint shares for each T-Mobile US share. Based on closing share prices on April 27, this represents a total implied enterprise value of approximately $59 billion for Sprint and approximately $146 billion for the combined company. The new company will have a strong closing balance sheet and a fully funded business plan with a strong foundation of secured investment grade debt at close.

UK telecommunications colossus Vodafone has partnered with Swedish vendor Ericsson to trial next-generation 5G technology in Ireland’s capital city Dublin. Vodafone has claimed that the trial was a success and the pilot represents the very first live 5G test of the emerging technology in Ireland.