Bell launches support for near-gigabit LTE speeds in Canada

Near-gigabit speeds are coming to one Canadian carrier.

Bell, the third-largest carrier in Canada, has announced that it now supports quad-band LTE Advanced in some parts of Canada, enabling speeds of up to 750Mbps.

The company launched tri-band LTE Advanced a couple of years ago, but now that the Galaxy S8 is approaching release, and with the support of gigabit LTE speeds with 256QAM and 4x4 MIMO, Bell is taking the opportunity to re-ignite the wireless speed war that was active with Rogers a few years ago.

Bell is leveraging four separate wireless bands — Band 4, Band 7, Band 12 and Band 13 — to achieve speeds of up to 550Mbps across the country, with supported hardware. Toronto and cities in Atlantic Canada can reach speeds of 750Mbps with support for 256QAM on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+.

Most people won't necessarily notice this huge surge in wireless speeds, especially on the data-limited plans that many Canadians have to deal with, but it's good to see that carriers are still adding functionality to their networks to not only make them faster but more efficient. The more important upside to this announcement is the additional efficiencies gained from quad-band aggregation, which allows customers to source wireless signal from the fastest possible route.

Carriers in the U.S. such as Sprint and T-Mobile have also rolled out similar upgrades to their networks in order to approach speeds of 1Gbps, but they're not widely available just yet.

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