EE, Qualcomm and Sony, with its Xperia XZ Premium smartphone, partnered to show Gigabit LTE mobile broadband working in a real world UK environment today.

During an event at Wembley Stadium in London - which EE sponsors - Pocket-lint saw the new Sony phone achieve download speeds of up to 750Mbps on 4G. Upload speeds are quoted at 110Mbps.

The Sony Xperia XZ Premium is the first phone to be Cat 16 compliant, so is the only one currently able to make use of Gigabit LTE. It was hooked up to a laptop in order to show real-time download throughput via its mobile broadband connection and it did achieve stable speeds of between 600Mbps and 750Mbps.

Other demos included streaming Amazon Video content - The Grand Tour - in 4K HDR on the phone without any drop in quality or glitches. The handset itself has a 4K HDR display. It is also uses the Snapdragon 835 chipset and Snapdragon x16 modem chip.

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Pocket-lint

EE has already switched on Gigabit LTE tech in Cardiff and London's Tech City and plans to roll out the service to other major cities throughout the rest of 2017 and into 2018. Only users of Cat 16 handsets - of which the Sony is the only one available at present - will be able to access the service.

The network says that it will be available to those on the upper tier price plans already. There are currently no plans to add a premium for Gigabit LTE connectivity.

Gigabit LTE speeds are possible through carrier aggregation, which EE achieves using several bands of its 1800 and 2600MHz bandwidth in the UK.

It also has a benefit to standard 4G users as those using Gigabit LTE will do so for less time - as their processes will be quicker - therefore freeing more bandwidth for everybody else.