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The new, squeezable HTC U11 will be the first Sprint phone to support gigabit LTE, Sprint and HTC confirmed at a press event this morning. It'll also get its fastest speeds in Canada and Australia, although other US carriers will be in a slightly slower lane.
At launch, the U11 will be the fastest phone on Sprint's network, but the carrier isn't playing up the U11's gigabit capabilities because it hasn't built out much of that network yet. Gigabit speeds will roll out over the next 12 months, at which point there will be several Sprint phones on the market capable of running at maximum speed, Sprint execs told me.
But this does make the U11 Sprint's most currently future-proof phone, network-wise. It also gives HTC bragging rights over Motorola; its Z2 phone was used in a Sprint gigabit demo in March, but the device hasn't been formally announced yet.
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Gigabit LTE requires three technologies, and one is tricky. 3x carrier aggregation and 256QAM encoding are mostly software. But 4x4 MIMO requires new antennas tuned to a specific band. If a phone doesn't support 4x4 MIMO on your carrier's band, you're out of luck.
That's why the Samsung Galaxy S8 is a gigabit LTE phone on AT&T and T-Mobile, but not Sprint. Its 4x4 MIMO antennas are on the bands AT&T and T-Mobile predominantly uses, but not the Band 41 that Sprint needs to hit the highest speeds.
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The U11 has 4x4 MIMO on bands 3, 7, and 41. Band 3 is used by Telstra in Australia to enable its gigabit network, which we tested in January. Band 7 is popular with the three major Canadian carriers. Band 41 is Sprint.
While there will also be an unlocked version of the U11 compatible with the three other major US carriers, HTC said, it won't have the 4x4 MIMO advantage and may therefore get slightly slower overall network speeds than phones with that technology. Currently, the Galaxy S8 and S8+ are the only gigabit phones for the other carriers, although more devices will roll out later this year.
The HTC U11 goes on pre-sale today and will be on shelves June 9 for $696.
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