Dish Network might still be considered a newbie to the commercial 5G cellular game, but it’s quickly tapping into the advanced nature of its network architecture to hit performance metrics that so far have been the domain of its more established competitors.

One of those performance marks was announced this week when Dish claimed it hit ludicrous downlink and uplink speeds by combining its diverse spectrum holdings running on its 5G standalone (SA) network and equipment from Qualcomm and Samsung.

The lab test aggregated two channels of uplink frequency division duplex (FDD) spectrum into a single 35-megahertz band that produced network speeds reaching 200 Mb/s. It also aggregated four channels of downlink FDD spectrum into a single 75-megahertz channel to produce speeds up to 1.3 Gb/s. That spectrum was spread across Dish Network’s 600 MHz low-band and 1.7/2.1 GHZ mid-band spectrum holdings that currently power its 5G network.

Data was transmitted across Dish Network’s 5G SA network between devices running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X75 5G modem, on top of Samsung’s 5G virtualized radio access network (vRAN) equipment and using dual- and tri-band radios.

The trial is one of Dish Network’s first public forays into promoting its potential network performance.

The carrier only recently hit a significant coverage milestone that was needed for the operator to maintain control over some of its spectrum assets. That coverage mark also included a performance milestone, which in this case was for that network to produce downlink speeds in excess of 35 Mb/s.

Dish Network now appears to be setting itself up to start pushing its performance boundaries.

Operators and their vendor partners have increasingly looked to improve network performance by tapping into the scalability of 5G SA network cores and aggregating increasingly diverse spectrum holdings.

T-Mobile US, for instance, recently combined spectrum running on its 5G SA core to produce downlink speeds in excess of 3 Gb/s, while a separate test produced uplink speeds in excess of 200 Mb/s.

That uplink/downlink balance is gaining increased focus as operators look to better support user-generated video content.

Uplink speeds in wireless networks often trail that of downlink speeds. This is most often due to the power requirements needed to beam a spectrum-heavy connection between a device and base station. Most end-user devices obviously have a smaller form factor than a cell tower so they need more creative antenna technology to support the signal. The devices also often rely on an embedded battery, which can quickly heat up and drain while trying to power that connection.

This discrepancy was made clear in Opensignal’s recent 5G Experience Report, which showed 5G download speeds ranging between 80 Mb/s and more than 195 Mb/s, while upload speeds were between 12 Mb/s and 19 Mb/s.

However, analysts have noted that wireless uplink speeds are becoming increasingly important for both consumer and enterprise customers.

Consumer market demand is being driven by the growth in end user–generated video content that is often created or streamed from a mobile device and is uploaded from that device to social media platforms across a cellular connection.

“As mobile internet trends move away from downloading content to creating content and supporting real-time communications services, upload speeds are becoming more vital and new technologies are emerging that boost upstream capacity,” Opensignal noted in its report.