CES 2011: T-Mobile To Transition To 42Mbps HSPA+

Good news, T-Mobilers — your “4G” network is about to get a whole lot faster. Twice as fast, actually. We’re at T-Mobile’s Press Conference at CES 2011, where the carrier has just announced that they’ll be “doubling down” on their HSPA+ network, cranking things up from 21Mbps to 42Mbps.

Theoretical speed limits are fine and dandy — but how are the real speeds? Pretty dang decent, it seems. T-Mobile did a quick test wherein they compared the speeds of their 42Mbps HSPA+ network to those of Verizon’s LTE network, and things were pretty much neck and neck (though Verizon’s LTE proved to be just a hair faster in the end). They were averaging around 28 megabits per second in their live test.

No word just yet on how long the transition will take to roll out country-wide — we’ll update this post if we hear otherwise.