The UK government is running out of time to hit their own pre-election target of providing at least a 10 Mbps internet connection in all homes by 2020. Continually delayed connection into these rural areas is stunting growth and preventing innovation. Could faster implementation of 5G be the solution? Probably not, yet anyway.
5G users in the UK could see a vast improvement in their mobile services in the 5G era. No-one is quite sure how fast it will be though. Initially Ofcom were predicting a three of four fold increase in speeds over the current capability of the 4G network. That could prove to be very conservative. Testing is still on going and various 5G delivery methods are still under consideration from different providers but the initial possibilities look tantalising.
With claims of ratified speeds over 7.5Gbps, Samsung appear to be making real progress. Their most recent demonstrations provided a consistent connection of over 1Gbps in a vehicle travelling in excess of 120 MPH, the test also evaluated interruption time as the connection switched from base station to base station. Although it wasn't like for like, the first UK based tests were conducted by EE in conjunction with Huawei and demonstrated lab based speeds of over 2.5Gbps. Other providers are claiming even faster laboratory test results of up to 10Gbps. This might eventually prove to be unachievable the real world but we can start to assume that the 5G network will provide at least a tenfold increase in downloads speeds by the time of implementation in the early 2020s.
It's not all about increased speed though. The 5G network will also vastly decrease latency. Latency is the time delay in transferring data to and from a user's device. Both connection speed and latency massively affect the user's experience. The average latency on a 4G network of around 50 ms is half of the latency we were used to whilst operating on the 3G network. You would assume the new 5G network might half this again, but the target is for just 1 ms latency. Although it's a significant engineering challenge, this target could enable a massive revolution in mobile services enabling connections for self-driving cars or other platforms that require ultra-low latency networks.
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Qualcomm Snapdragon X50 - Next Gen Chip[/caption]
Waiting for the possibilities of 5G[/caption]
