BARCELONA—ZTE's announcement of a prototype "Gigabit Phone" confused us a few days ago here at MWC. But things got a little bit clearer when we went to ZTE's booth, and found that its "gigabit phone" prototype already exists and is in fact gigabit.
"The Gigabit phone announced at MWC is a prototype and what ZTE is working toward for the very near future. It has all of the components of a 5G phone and is something that we can commercialize once carriers are ready to implement," the company said in a statement.
This statement is a little bit sneaky, because the idea that gigabit LTE is "5G" is very cheeky. Many people in the industry say that to truly be 5G, you'll need "5G new radio," a different radio system from LTE. But here at the show, Sprint and T-Mobile tried to imply that they might brand gigabit LTE as 5G. ZTE seems to be on that train, too.
"I think that the gigabit LTE path that we're on is our path to 5G," Sprint CTO John Saw said. "I think 5G is more than just gigabit LTE."
At ZTE's press conference, execs perplexed us by saying that the gigabit phone would take a year or two to commercialize. As a company rep explained, that delay isn't about the phone hardware—it's more of a comment on how long it will take carriers to set up gigabit LTE networks. Sprint and T-Mobile were both discussing gigabit LTE at this show and have launches planned for sometime later this year, but the technology won't be widespread until next year.
"It will not be a blanket bombing approach. It wil be very driven by where the customer demand is," Sprint technical COO Gunther Ottendorfer said.
With its phone prototype, ZTE was clearly just trying to garner some bragging rights for its technology leadership here. ZTE and Sony had the only two working Snapdragon 835-based "gigabit LTE" phones we saw at the show, although the ZTE Gigabit Phone and the Sony Xperia XZ Premium were trapped under glass and not touchable by folks on the floor. The Samsung Galaxy S8, which will be announced on March 29, is anticipated to be the first actual retail phone with the potential for gigabit LTE capabilities, but of course it wasn't out here at MWC.