At the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Vodafone, alongside Nokia today conducted the first live public 5G demonstration in Australia.
The 5G demonstration this morning was an indicator of what’s possible with 5G technology with download speeds up to 5 Gbps achieved with a stunning 3ms latency. The demonstration hogged a massive 200MHz of spectrum, allowing for the remote control of a robot and the crown jewel: downloading a 50GB season of Game of Thrones in Full HD in just 10 seconds – that’s 5Gbps.
The introduction of 5G in Australia and around the world presents more than just an opportunity to get access to your favourite TV shows though, with emerging technologies like Virtual Reality also able to take advantage of the faster speeds and lower-latency offered by 5G. The demonstration showed off footage recorded with Nokia’s OZO 360-degree VR camera streamed at 1.5Gbps, though Vodafone says up to 4.5Gbps is possible.
Nokia is obviously not just involved in the VR side of things with emerging 5G technologies, Nokia’s Managing Director, Oceania, Ray Owen, said that 5G will significantly affect every industry, creating new and exciting opportunities.
5G is the next generation of radio systems and network architecture that will enable significant new use cases, new business opportunities and new ways for people to benefit from communications.
Nokia is working with a number of partners around the world to implement the new 5G standards, standards which are also being developed by researchers at UTS.
Researchers at UTS are working on diverse improvements to 5G technologies including several projects covering antenna design, development of systems and networks. UTS is also involved with researching solutions which will use 5G to power the emerging Internet of Things
While Vodafone Chief Technology Officer Kevin Millroy said that Vodafone’s 4G network will be around for many years to come, 5G will be a fundamental leap forward in mobile network technology. Mr Millroy is looking at the promise of what 5G can offer, going on to say
5G will to propel a technological revolution. With IoT promising to change all of our lives, it calls for a technology which can handle an immense amount of simultaneous connections, far greater than the capabilities of 4G networks.
Vodafone hasn’t announced a timeline for rolling out their 5G network, and they’re not alone in trialling the technology in Australia. Last month Telstra conducted trials with their partner Ericsson ahead of a public trial at the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast in 2018.
The implementation of 5G technology is going to use more spectrum, something which will see shuffles in existing use of spectrum that includes the shutdown of the 2G network. All three carriers in Australia have announced a shutdown of their respective 2G, with Telstra starting in December and Optus and Vodafone following next year.
5G offers a lot of possibilities for all Australians, the question is now when will it be going live.
5Gbps or 5GB/s ?
isn’t 50GB/10s = 5GB per second or 5×8 = 40Gbps ?
5Gbps would be roughly 625MB/s
Vodafone confirmed 5Gbps
If a network company doesn’t know its bits from its bytes, we’re all screwed!
My guess is that the people who know these things said “5Gbps” and some dude in marketing needed something snappy and made up downloading GoT. 5Gbps is being reported everywhere and the GoT download is being quoted extensively (and clearly incorrectly).
maybe they left off a zero 50GB in 100s = 5GB per 10 seconds or ~500MB/s which would be inline with 5Gbps speeds capping off at 625MB/s
Wireless technologies making NBN look outdated every single day
Advantage of wired infrastructure is that the wireless speeds can be surpassed more easily with simple updates to routers and hardware once fibre is everywhere.
Finer is not going to be everywhere due to Abbott and co
Thanks Obama…
Vodafone will need more than the <10GHz of 900MHz spectrum it will obtain when it shuts down 2G in order to have 200MHz of spectrum for 5G. In fact, I don't even know how Vodafone obtained those speeds, given its limited spectrum.
Regardless, it's nothing for customers to get excited about. If engineers downloaded a 50GB file in 10 seconds, people with 5GB of data per month would use their monthly quota in one second!
Plus downloading a file when you are the only user and off a computer with multiple SSDs in a Raid 1 configuration