Japan's NTT DoCoMo and Finland's Nokia are partnering to develop 5G technology, which should be ready to showcase at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
5G, a collection of nebulous guidelines meant to address the exploding requirements for carrying escalating amounts of mobile data and video that consumers and businesses seem to require, will support speeds up to 1,000 times faster than today's 4G LTE networks.
5G wireless networks will support connections for at least 100 billion devices, and a 10Gbps individual user experience capable of extremely low latency and response times. The idea is to support applications like multiuser UltraHD telepresence, real 3D video, virtual reality and augmented reality services and so on.
DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile operator, and Nokia, the world's third biggest telecom equipment maker, said that so far they have achieved data transmission speeds of higher than 2Gbps in a joint indoor trial using Nokia Networks' radio technology operating in the 70GHz spectrum band. An outdoor 70GHz trial is scheduled for later this year.
The 70GHz band of airwaves is part of a range of spectrum from 10GHz to 100GHz that the International Telecommunications Union is expected to free up by 2019.