Pre-5G Speeds of 12 Gbps Demonstrated

Talking about tests of pre-5G mobile network platforms, multi-gigabit speeds with ultra-low latency have been seen, T-Mobile US says.

“We’ve already demonstrated speeds up to 12 Gbps with latency under two milliseconds, 8x8 MIMO and four simultaneous 4k video streams,” says Neville Ray, T-Mobile US CTO, reporting on tests of Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung platforms.

Granted, commercial deployments tend to operate differently from “lab tests” or “field trials.” But the 5G promise of gigabit and multi-gigabit speeds appears to be grounded in reality.

Aside from what 5G at such speeds and latency will mean for mobile apps, it clearly will be possible to consider full fixed network substitution, if spectrum costs are low enough. The reason is simply that fixed network data consumption tends to be an order of magnitude or more higher than typical mobile usage.

So real substitution by “mobile” networks of the fixed networks not only must deliver equivalent bandwidth, but also price-per-gigabyte that is comparable to fixed network prices. Low or “free” spectrum costs would help.