Damping down 5G ambitions
The move to the next generation of mobile phone technology has much the same 'cadence' as Moore's Law. While Moore pushes companies to the next process technology node every 18months or so, mobile phones move to the next G every 10 years. The first mobiles were introduced in 1981 and the industry has pretty much kept to schedule since then.
4G appeared as a usable technology a couple of years ago and now the early signs of 5G are appearing, with a target date for implementation of 2020.
Today's smartphones are multimedia platforms - and 5G phones may well enhance that ability significantly. Samsung has recently released information about its 5G ambitions. Using a 28GHz carrier, the Korean giant has transmitted a 1Gbit/s signal over 2km. That, it says, is sufficient to stream full HD video while on the move.
The real world will be different. One of the biggest problems will be the weather - it's well known that rain attenuates millimetre wave communications. Not so much 'I'm on the train' as 'I'm in the rain'.
