Researchers at the 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) at the University of Surrey have managed to achieve breathtakingly fast 5G data transfer speeds. In laboratory conditions, over 100m distances, the researchers have managed to exceed 1Tbps transfer speeds wirelessly. The speeds tower above Samsung's recent proud 'industry best' boasts of achieving 7.5Gbps 5G transfers.
V3 news magazine spoke to Professor Rahim Tafazolli, director of the 5GIC, to get some background information about the super-fast wireless connectivity research. An obviously proud Tafazolli said that "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." He went on to state that he and his fellow researchers want to demonstrate the technology working in public ahead of rivals from South Korea, Russia and Japan.
About a month ago Ofcom announced how it was laying the foundations for 5G networking in the UK and talked about expected speeds in the range from 10Gbps to 50Gbps. With its far greater speeds the 5G technology is expected to make possible technologies which just aren't feasible today such as relatives "virtually attending family occasions," via real-time holographic video and specialist surgeons doing remote work thanks to 3D medical imaging over 5G.
Professor Tafazolli also talked about the future of applications which use or even rely upon 5G. "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 said. Tafazolli proposes that a latency of under 1ms must be achieved to provide some degree of future-proofing as the 5G standard is expected to be our communications foundation for at least a decade after its introduction.
