A standards body for the next-generation wireless network says it can hit a deadline of 2019 instead of 2020.
Qualcomm CEO Stephen Mollenkopf and his company have been pushing to get their chip technology ready for 5G.
5G’s coming — and it will be here faster than predicted.
5G New Radio (5G NR), a flavor of the next-generation wireless network that’s expected to be the global standard, should be available for large-scale deployments in 2019, a year earlier than anticipated, nearly two dozen companies said Sunday.
The companies who’ve vowed to reach a standard for 5G for that timeframe included a mix of wireless carriers, chip providers and handset makers — such as Qualcomm, Intel, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom — that are part of the 3GPP standards group.
“For consumers, this means they’re going to get an elevated broadband experience in 2019,” Rasmus Hellberg, senior director of technical marketing at Qualcomm, told CNET in an interview ahead of the news, which was announced at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona, Spain.
Notably missing from the list was Verizon Wireless, which is pursuing its own flavor of 5G. Verizon has said it will offer 5G to some customers in 11 cities by midyear. It’s not full mobile wireless. Instead it’s a replacement for fixed broadband.
Many carriers, like AT&T, had pushed for 5G technology to arrive sooner rather than later.
