Time to get jealous boys and girls, as AT&T has just demonstrated 28.87Mbps of download speed over the air using LTE technology. Yes, while our 3G carrier struggles to provide the advertised 3Mbps speed that they stick on their brochure at “best effort”, US leading carrier AT&T has just demonstrated at their Foundry innovation centre in Texas their upcoming LTE network.

GigaOM was around during the demonstration, and this was shown as a “real time” speed, something that DiGi also used to advertise their 3G speed. This is not the “max” possible speed of the technology, but what AT&T’s LTE network is capable of in real world.

GigaOM witnessed a connection with 28.87Mbps download and 10.4Mbps upload speed using a MIMO antenna passing bits through both 700MHz and AWS frequencies. In actual LTE is capable of higher speed than this, in fact LTE promised speed up at least 100Mbps download and 50Mbps upload, but that’s just on the paper.

AT&T executive told the publication that these were meant to be real-world numbers. Of course, we have to consider the location of this technology demonstration, and that the network is still new and not congested, like how DiGi’s 3G network used to be when they just started. Still, that speed is very impressive compared to my measly 1Mbps Streamyx.

SOURCE via GigaOM