The new “next big thing” for carriers to crow about is going to be Gigabit LTE service. Verizon has already announced plans to launch it later this year, while T-Mobile , AT&T , and Sprint have all announced or tested version as well. Gigabit LTE should bring unbelievably fast speeds, with download speeds reaching around 1 Gb/s and upload speeds up to 150 Mbps. To get those kinds of speeds, Verizon will use four carrier aggregation and leverage both licensed and unlicensed spectrum. This technology is called Licensed Assisted Access or LAA. Several phones like the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus , HTC U11 , and Moto Z2 Force all feature the hardware to see these speeds. They all have Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 processor and Snapdragon X16 LTE modem , but the Moto Z2 Force is the first of the bunch to get a software update to allow it to hit Gigabit speeds. And, as Verizon points out, ...