Fudzilla had a chance to play with the world’s first Gigabit LTE network in Sydney Australia, and ZTE thinks that Gigabit LTE is so important that it chose to include it as part of the phone name.

ZTE was demonstrating speeds up to 979 Mbits per second, and it was ranging at 920 Mbps most of the time. Of course, the average speed will be much less than that, but it will definitely show a tremendous improvement compared to Cat 6 300 Mbit per second networks that are deployed in most parts of the world.

Snapdragon 835 is the first SoC to have the Gigabit LTE class modem inside, but we are starting to hear that Exynos 8895, a 10nm Samsung’s SoC might also come with a Gigabit LTE class modem. If this is the case, carriers around the world will definitely speed up its deployment of the Gigabit Class LTE networks.

ZTE calls its phone simply the Gigabit Phone and a company representative told us that there are no pricing or availability data. ZTE is building the infrastructure and realizes the importance of flagship modem performance. In the end, it will help them sell more equipment on the infrastructure side such as base stations and cell towers.

Sony is the first company to have a phone that is further from the prototype phase but neither Sony or ZTE wanted to talk about the launch timeframe. One can imagine that it should not be far away and that April might be the time when some companies are expected to start shipping the Snapdragon 835 - at least we can expect that from Samsung.