Google Pixel 6 5G is about to get faster than ever on T-Mobile

The speed boost will come to both the Pixel 6 and the Pixel 6 Pro, and was actually first discovered by a fan of the publication who decided to check out the modem log of his own daily driver, the Pixel 6. Both members of the Pixel 6 series carry Samsung's in-house Exynos 5123b wireless connection modem, which was freshly released this year. 

The modem log, which he has since submitted and is hosted on 4G/5G Bands & Combos, simply revealed the way that the modem handled both uplink and downlink traffic, employing various channels on multiple different bands of the spectrum. This is known as carrier aggregation, or CA, because use of the available resources is simply optimized to allow for a higher data rate per each cell.

The website 4G/5G Bands & Combos serves to list just such data, which is based on real logs from on-board smartphone modems—since a smartphone or modem maker will never actually tell you their supported combinations for 4G or 5G carrier aggregation as part of your device specs; they simply show you a 4G/5G support category number, and leave it at that.

The new log, when contrasted against the previous one from October, contains a new carrier aggregation combination for two of the 5G bands: n71 and n41. According to AndroidPolice's sleuthing, these are actually a direct match to two of T-Mobile's airwaves, 600 MHz and 2.5 GHZ. T-Mobile has apparently been testing carrier aggregation on these airwaves since 2020, and plans to send it live in 2022.

When T-Mobile finally turns on its 5G network carrier aggregation next year, the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro—which already feature millimeter wave 5G reception—will be all set to boost their wireless connection speeds to even higher limits than before.