In a pair of dueling blog posts, both Sprint and T-Mobile CTOs John Saw and Neville Ray are promising gigabit wireless speeds sometime in the new year. In a post to the T-Mobile website, T-Mobile'a Ray said the company has achieved speeds of 979 Mbps downstream during LTE tests by the company, and that T-Mobile is seeing speeds upwards of 1.8 Gbps in early fifth generation (5G) wireless trials.

"Just last week we reached nearly 1 Gbps (979 Mbps) on our LTE network in our lab thanks to a combination of three carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO and 256 QAM (and an unreleased handset)," Ray said. "This is the fastest speed possible on a mobile device today and T-Mobile will absolutely be first to Gigabit speeds!"

Sprint's Saw said something similar in a blog post of his own at the Sprint website.

"In 2017 we expect to unveil some innovative work with 256 QAM and Massive MIMO pushing 1 Gbps class speed boundaries, all on our licensed spectrum," said Saw. "This will be an important demonstration with speed as a proxy for capacity showcasing the incredible potential of our deep 2.5 GHz spectrum position."

And while Sprint and T-Mobile have joined the gigabit wireless hype race, it's unclear how many people will actually be able to get anything close to these kinds of speeds in the new year -- or precisely how much it will cost.

»youtu.be/99_TYo-HGmk