Verizon first launched its 4G LTE network way back in December 2010, and a few years later, the service hit 500 markets and Verizon said that the rollout was “substantially complete.” Now Verizon is gearing up to begin testing 5G.
Verizon says that it plans to begin field trials of a 5G wireless network in 2016. The big red carrier expects 5G to offer “about 50 times the throughput” of 4G LTE as well as latency that’s measured in milliseconds and the ability to handle many more connected devices. Roger Gurnani, Verizon’s chief information and technology architect, expects that “some level of commercial deployment” of 5G will begin in 2017.
4G LTE service is pretty fast, especially if it utilizes tech like carrier aggregation, but Gurnani says that 5G will offer speeds faster than Google Fiber’s home broadband service. That’s pretty crazy. Of course, it’ll be a few years before we start to see 5G service and devices that support it made available to consumers in a meaningful way. But this is still pretty exciting news if you’re into wireless, which if you’re reading this blog, you probably are.