5G could even make Google Fiber look slow …
Early tests of Verizon‘s 5G technology show that it can achieve connection speeds 30-50 times faster than 4G/LTE – above the speeds offered by Google Fiber’s gigabit wired broadband. Even better, the company expects to have “some level of commercial deployment” by 2017, some three years earlier than expected, reports CNET.
To put that speed difference into perspective, the movie Guardians of the Galaxy would take around six minutes to download over a good LTE connection – while 5G would have it downloaded to your device in just 15 seconds …
There is, of course, a big difference between beginning commercial deployment with a select number of clients and you or I being able to get our hands on all that tasty, tasty bandwidth. There will also be the usual chicken-and-egg situation with faster data speeds: carriers waiting until there are enough devices capable of using it before they make it widely available, and manufacturers like Apple waiting until the network capacity is sufficiently widespread to make it worth adding to devices.
But Verizon does look to be upping the pace, moving tests out of the lab and into the field during the next 12 months. That could encourage others to speed up their own plans. South Korea had been expected to be first to launch, with a trial 5G network in place for the Winter Olympics in 2018, Japan aiming for the Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2020.
“It’s a very aggressive timeline,” said Rima Qureshi, chief strategy officer of telecommunications equipment supplier Ericsson. “It’ll be interesting to see what the reaction is.”
Trials have so far been limited to Verizon’s own innovation centers in Waltham, Massachusetts, and San Francisco. It will need the government to release more radio spectrum before it can go beyond field tests.
For technical trials themselves, we have what we need,” said Roger Gurnani, chief information and technology architect for Verizon. “Beyond that, 5G will require big bands of spectrum.”
Apple generally adopts a wait-and-see policy with new technology, having waited until the iPhone 5 in 2012 before adding LTE capabilities to its iPhones – almost two years after carriers began offering the faster connection speeds. It did, however, move more swiftly with LTE Advanced (LTE-A), adding support for the 150Mbit/s fast-track LTE service in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
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I wonder if Netflix reads articles like these
Accidentally click play on a video and buffer 3gig of data before you can cancel it…..5G really needs to bring back a true unlimited tier.
verizon has the never to call 12gb of shared data the XL plan, i’m pretty sure unlimited is never coming back.
…but with data limits who’s downloading an entire movie over a cellular connection?? The faster the connection, the better quality the stream, the quicker you run through your monthly data. Providers should be working on ways to provide more data, not making it faster.
Faster means more data through a single downlink. That means greater network capacity overall. And lower cost per MB to the carrier. Which should mean lower data costs / bigger data caps for users. It probably won’t, but it sure should. And as for working on the right part, lowering the overhead to deliver the data is certainly the right mole to whack.
This has nothing to do with moving data faster, it has to do with the amount of capacity each cell tower can carry at a time. In order words, don’t look at it at 1GBps, look at it 1Gbps for 1000 users, rather than 1Gbps per user. If 4G tower can only carry 100Mbps, it can only handle 1Mbps for 100 people but upgraded to 5G, it can carry 1Mbps for 1000 people.
In order words, they are working on providing more data but it has to be managed properly to limit the network congestion. In other words, if specific user use it far more than other users, move them to the slower cell tower like 2G/3G/4G towers, which will be more sparse as more users are moved to 5G (what Tmobile is doing, which is offering unlimited 2G/3G). To make money, some carriers choose to not do that but rather block these users and charge to keep using 5G.
Ok, now make it public, divy that up between a couple hundred people per antenna and 45mb/s sounds likely, then take into account there is rarely a 4 bar connection and you can see past the marketing
Wow thats crazy. I was testing T mobile LTE speed in Atlanta yesterday morning, i got an average 100mbps down 30 up. best was 129.9mbps. i did about 5 test and it already used more than 700MB of my data. I think carrier need to increase the data limit for 5g.
You might want to double check your usage; what app are you using for speed testing? T-Mobile whitelists the common speed testing apps, they do not count against your data. I recently switched from ATT to T-Mo and I use the Speedtest.net app constantly, when I go into Settings and cellular data usage, I can see that that app has used 2GB. But I’ve only used 1.6GB TOTAL when I login to my T-Mo account. If the speed tests were counting against me, I’d be well over 3.6GB. Music streaming from the whitelisted services and speed tests should not count against your T-Mo data allowance.
Oh i didnt know that. i only check through the usage(setting)
No question, iPhone customers will want 5G. It would be a poor decision if Apple doesn’t adopt it as soon as 5G hits the market.
Expect broad availability in no less than six to eight years
iPhone customers wants better battery life than faster data connection that they might not be able to use for more than a few hours.
Remember why Apple didn’t adopt 4G right off the bat, many Android devices that adopted 4G first had a lot of issues with maintaining battery life because 4G chipset was too hot and too big. Apple waited until the 4G chips were better.
They’ll do the same thing with 5G, they will wait until there are optimized for battery chips before including it in 5G but they’re definitely not going to include it in the first few years of the 5G market.
Sure its capable.. They won’t give you that much speed. Just makes room for more customers. You’ll keep your same average speeds as before.
I’m not sure if I’m the only one, but I’m not thinking about this as much for my iPhone as I am for my home internet. I live in an area right now where my options for home internet are Comcast, or Comcast. They have me by the throat if I want home internet. Verizon thinks its too expensive to lay FiOS cable in my area so that will never happen (and they are probably right). I think 5G wireless is exactly what’s needed to break the stranglehold cable companies have in some areas where they have 0 competition. If T-Mobile, Verizon, ATT, or Sprint could throw up one 5G tower in my area and hit thousands of homes, give me a home router capable of catching the signal, and compete on price with my Comcast internet, I’d switch in a heartbeat.
You won’t be able to download many movies on a 16GB iPhone.
Ever more ridiculous speed claims from mobile corporations.
Meanwhile, out in the real world big chunks of the country still hasn’t got a proper 3G signal yet.
Look at that ping there. That’s really insanely good. If it can hold those kind of ping numbers in real world tests PlayStation Now and other game streaming services will really become possible on mobile anywhere like music with Spotify.
What good is all the speed if they still limit you to 2GB of data month?
Well, I think the Chicken and the Egg argument adds more credence to Apple’s MVNO rumours. It really makes it easier for Apple to be ahead of the pack on Wireless innovations, by working with partners like Verizon to successfully deploy a 5G network in time for a new iPhone iteration. Verizon gets the assurance that Apple will be paying for their portion of the network before a new product is ever released. It also makes the iPhone the key to accessing 5G service until manufactures are able to catch up, which will certainly bring over Android switchers.
Some people dismiss gigabit+ wireless with “well yeah, but websites are slow anyway” argument. While website engineering has a lot of catching up to do, eventually, gigabit+ wireless access will transform how we store and use our device. Most of your data will be stored on the cloud, with local storage effectively playing “L4” cache role.
Where’s the upload speed at? Sure the download speed looks very nice, But it’s all about the upload speed.. For making youtube videos.
VERIZON eh? A lot of good that will do when they cap it and then you watch 1 or 2 movies or maybe 3 hours of netflix and you’d reached your entirely monthly cap limit before lunchtime on your first day of it.
Maybe the picture above is simply symbolic, if not then, 915 is certainly NOT faster than GOOGLE FIBER.. Everyone I know that has Google Fiber is topping 965-985 Sure. It’s not much of a different at those speeds but is is most certainly, not faster.
The photo is indeed illustrative: it’s a speed test on Google Fiber
In theory, it would be amazing if this 5G connection would be able to compete with Google Fiber lines. However, it is highly unlikely that is so. Verizon is going to need to prove to its users that it is in fact a faster alternative. They are going to have to offer user beta’s and really test their servers. Until the future 5G is tested in a real world scenario, then it is all speculation. If millions of people are able to use the 5G connection at the same time and it proves to hold up, then we can begin our excitement. Until it is proven, though, we must assume that is still a work in progress.