5G Research Records 1TBps Speeds

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Tomorrow’s 5G Internet is being developed today at the University of Surrey

The 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) at the University of Surrey in the UK announced at the V3 Enterprise Mobility Summit on Thursday that 5G speeds of 1Tbps have been achieved during recent testing, significantly faster than any previous technology.

According to 5GIC Director Professor Rahim Tafazolli, this was the first time ever that such speeds had been achieved, far faster than the results of Samsung’s 7.5Gbps and other new technologies.

Tafazolli explained that 5GIC has been working on new technologies to support 5G services, and the development of these innovations led to the amazing 1Tbps results.

More on the new 5G technology

“We have developed 10 more breakthrough technologies and one of them means we can exceed 1Tbps wirelessly. This is the same capacity as fibre optics but we are doing it wirelessly,” Tafazolli noted.

He noted the tests were carried out in lab conditions over a distance of 100 meters using transmitters and receivers designed and assembled at the university.

However, despite the record-setting speeds being achieved with the new technology, Tafazolli emphasized that the key drivers of 5G are really latency and reliability, and pointed out the 5G standard is supposed to last for 20 years.

“An important aspect of 5G is how it will support applications in the future. We don’t know what applications will be in use by 2020, or 2030 or 2040 for that matter, but we know they will be highly sensitive to latency,” he commented. “We need to bring end-to-end latency down to below one millisecond so that it can enable new technologies and applications that would just not be possible with 4G.”

However, experts point out that whether such speeds are achievable in real-world environments, and particularly in commercial deployments, is not clear. Other technical experts have previously opined that speeds of 50Gbps could be expected from 5G.

First application of 5G on University of Surrey campus in late 2016 or 2017

The plan is to take this new 5G technology beyond a prototype and onto the campus of the university during late 2016 or 2017, then demonstrating it to the public in early 2018, a year or so ahead of rival teams from South Korea, Russia and Japan.

“We want to be the first in the world to show such high speeds,” Tafazolli said.

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