It’s been an exciting few days in the Gigabit LTE world, with the news that Verizon, along with Ericsson and Qualcomm Technologies, achieved 953 Mbps in a real world environment deployment.

Let’s break down the relationship between advertised network peak speeds, the technologies used to achieve those speeds, and how the LTE capabilities inside the smartphone determine whether you can take advantage of them. This is about to get nerdy — but it’s important. Get ready.

First, let’s review the factors that determine the peak theoretical speed of a network:

The width of each LTE connection that the network is sending data over (e.g., 15 MHz, 20 MHz…), and the frequency, or band, of the LTE connection (e.g. Band 2, Band 4, etc.)

The number of those LTE connections, and whether they can be “aggregated” together to form a wider connection. We refer to this technique as carrier aggregation.

The number of antennas used to send data over each LTE connection to the mobile device. We refer to this as MIMO (multiple input, multiple output).

The maximum number of 1s and 0s that the network can send in each LTE signal, or modulation (e.g., 64 QAM – 6 bits, 256 QAM – 8 bits).

Whether the network uses separate connections for downloading and uploading (this is called FDD), or whether the same LTE connection is used for download and upload (this is called TDD).

If you combine those factors, you can arrive at the peak theoretical speed that the network can deliver. We like to think of the LTE network as a highway for trucks, and your data as packages inside those trucks: the width of each lane, the number of lanes present, the number of decks that trucks can travel on, and the number of packages loaded per truck all determine how quickly your data travels.

Here are some hypothetical examples of different LTE networks, and how implementing the above technologies in different combinations affects the peak theoretical speed of each: