Verizon launched 50 per cent faster peak data speeds at many cities across the US, as rival Sprint attempted to get in on the act.

The largest operator in the country deployed LTE Advanced for more than 288 million users in 461 cities nationwide. As well as major cities, the operator is targeting highways, interstates, country roads and rural parts of the States, it said.

Verizon said users would receive a boost to their peak network speeds for no additional charge. LTE Advanced uses software that combines multiple channels to boost mobile data.

Verizon’s LTE Advanced uses software to combine two or three bandwidth channels into one larger channel.

Meanwhile, rival Sprint, working with vendor Samsung, gave what it claimed was the first live demonstration in the US of three-channel carrier aggregation.

The demonstration reached peak download speeds of more than 230 Mb/s running on Samsung’s infrastructure and using the vendor’s devices, including the Samsung Galaxy Note7, Galaxy S7, and Galaxy S7 edge.

Verizon said typical download speeds with LTE Advanced will continue to be 5-12 Mb/s, but two-channel aggregation has shown peak download speeds of up to 225 Mb/s, which is not much less than what Sprint claims for three-channel aggregation.

Verizon said its engineers had deployed three-channel carrier aggregation experiencing data speeds higher than 300 Mb/s.