Ookla says tests show average speed of 504Mbps down and 42.7Mbps up at one cell site in New York City with T-Mobile's Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) technology
T-Mobile is now boosting LTE download speeds to over 500Mbps by using Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) in New York City …
Context & Ripple Effects
This test lands mid-arc in a speed race Ookla has been documenting since its September 2017 Speedtest report, which already had T-Mobile as the fastest US mobile network. The 504Mbps figure is a single-site showcase of Licensed Assisted Access — LTE that borrows unlicensed spectrum to widen the downlink — rather than a network-wide average, which matters because rival AT&T was simultaneously marketing '5G E' phones running comparable LTE-Advanced technology at roughly 29Mbps averages.
First-order effects
- T-Mobile gains a headline claim of 500Mbps-class downloads on existing LTE infrastructure in New York City, usable immediately against AT&T's and Verizon's slower measured averages.
- Customers near the equipped cell site get materially faster downlinks today, but the 42.7Mbps upload shows the upgrade is asymmetric — consistent with the low national upload average Ookla later reported.
Second-order effects
- AT&T and Verizon face pressure to match unlicensed-spectrum aggregation with their own deployments, escalating the measurement-driven marketing battle OpenSignal captured when it found all three carriers' '5G' branded phones performing within about 1Mbps of each other.
- Ookla and OpenSignal become the arbiters of these claims, forcing carriers to compete on independently measured numbers rather than lab peaks — a dynamic that culminated in T-Mobile topping Ookla's H1 2024 rankings by a wide margin.
Third-order effects
- If carriers keep bridging to 5G by layering unlicensed spectrum onto LTE, network differentiation shifts from licensed holdings alone to who can aggregate spectrum most aggressively — while the persistent upload gap becomes a structural constraint on symmetric use cases like live streaming.
The trend: US carriers are using LTE-Advanced techniques like LAA as a stopgap speed arms race ahead of real 5G, with third-party speed tests turning marketing claims into measurable competition.