The promise of 5G has been, from the beginning, better reliability and, importantly, faster speeds. It’s so fast in many cases that you can actually use a 5G connection as your main home connection without issue.
Verizon appears to be trying to see just how far it can push the envelope, and the company’s latest experiment just yielded an amazing result.
Verizon, in collaboration with Samsung and MediaTek, has announced a groundbreaking achievement in 5G technology. The company managed to reach a peak download speed of 5.5 gigabits per second (Gbps) in a lab environment. That’s over 5 times faster than most fiber-optic home internet plans.
The breakthrough was made possible through the use of carrier aggregation, a technique that combines multiple spectrum bands (separate wireless connections) into one connection. In this case, it was six separate channels of sub-6 GHz spectrum (350 MHz of PCS, 850 MHz, AWS, CBRS and C-band spectrum).
The test utilized Samsung’s virtualized RAN (vRAN) solution and MediaTek’s next-gen connectivity platform featuring 6CC technology, running 5G data through Samsung’s 5G Standalone core.
All of this sounds complicated and full of tech jargon, but the short version is that customers can one day soon get speeds over a gigabit reliably over 5G. Importantly, the frequencies used were not millimeter-wave, which means the signal won’t be easily blocked by a window or a leaf.
Of course, this is just an experiment. Even under absolutely optimal network conditions, you’ll never reach the theoretical 5.5 Gbps speeds on your phone out in the wild (at least any time soon). This experiment was more to see how far would Verizon’s network go if pushed to the limit. That being said, even a fraction of those speeds using today’s technology would be incredible.
It remains to be seen just how necessary such speeds will be moving forward in the mobile space. How often do you need gigabit speeds on your phone, for example? The most obvious use case today would be for home internet services. If cellular internet can provide speeds rivaling (or exceeding) even fiber-optic offerings, the future of home internet competition is going to be great.
