Within a few years, 5G networks could turbocharge your smartphone. But can they pass the tests cooked up by engineers at an office park in New Jersey?
Live-streaming a virtual-reality broadcast. Downloading a 90-minute high-definition TV show to your smartphone in less than three seconds. Sending instant updates on road conditions to self-driving vehicles. These scenarios are impossible or prohibitively expensive on current cellular networks, but they should be feasible with the next generation of wireless connectivity, 5G. It promises to be 10 to 20 times faster than today’s cell-phone networks.
That’s because 5G will operate in a high-frequency portion of the radio spectrum, known as millimeter wave.
