Downloads to Your Phone Will Soon be Lightning Fast

Most of us with smartphones have LTE (4G) data connections, which, for the most part, can be pretty quick. But there are other territories–South Korea, Japan, parts of Australia and a few others–that have moved up to 4.5G. Now comes news from a telecommunications meeting in Barcelona that all the standard technical aspects of 5G will be settled by the end of the year.

What can we expect? Speed, and lots of it. It will be possible to download a two-hour movie in less than four seconds. We can do that now with 4G, but it would take six minutes.

Here are the raw from ZDNet:

Under the current International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT) 2020 technical performance requirements, 5G networks must be capable of downlink peak data rates of 20Gbps; uplink peak data rates of 10Gbps; downlink user-experienced data rates of 100Mbps; uplink user-experienced data rates of 50Mbps; 4ms latency for enhanced mobile broadband; and 1ms latency for ultra-reliable low-latency communications devices.

5G networks must also enable mobility maximum speeds of between 0km/h and 10km/h for pedestrians, 10km/h to 20km/h for vehicles, and 120km/h to 500km/h for high-speed vehicles; a connection density of 1 million devices per square kilometre; downlink peak spectrum efficiency of 30 bits/Hz; uplink peak spectrum efficiency of 15 bits/Hz; and area traffic capacity of 10Mbps per square metre.

Bottom line is that 5G will allow for higher bandwidth streaming, much faster downloads of audio and video and new potential for connecting cars to data networks.

Can’t wait. More details here.