The speeds we get on 4G are good, but they can be better… and 5G will practically blow your eyebrows off.
In the world of 5G, our top speeds of 300 to 600Mbps aren’t much at all, because while a 300Mbps downlink is closer to 37 megabytes per second, 5G can hit at a little over 20 gigabits per second, which itself lands at a little over 2 gigabytes per second.
That’s what Telstra has found when tested with Ericsson at a 5G research facility in Sweden, and the plan is to bring that sort of technology to Australia.
According to Telstra, research is being undertaken to discover whether this excitingly fast generation of mobile speeds can work in the Australian environment, even taking into account plant-life such as eucalyptus trees.
The first place to be tested won’t likely have a lot of those, however, with Telstra announcing that Queensland’s Gold Coast will be the first place to see a 5G test, starting in 2018.
“Telstra is well placed to evolve our 4G service, and we are putting the building blocks in place for Australia to be ready for 5G,” said Mike Wright, Group Managing Director of Networks at Telstra on the Telstra Exchange blog.
“Even though a major deployment of 5G is not expected until 2020, there’s lots of work underway around standards, testing, and spectrum and Telstra is at the forefront of these developments.”
Four years is a long time, and even though we won’t be seeing a completed nationwide roll-out until this time, Telstra plans to demonstrate the technology this year as a sort of preview for what you can expect.
September is when you will see that, with Telstra using this as a way of showcasing what 5G will perform like in a real-world environment.
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