Telecom industry publishes new concept of 5G standard

According to the latest draft version of the 5G standard, a cell must be able to achieve a download speed of at least 20Gbps under favorable conditions. Cell towers must also support one million connected devices per square kilometer.

For comparison, a download speed of about a single Gigabit can now be achieved on 4g. The upload speed of a cell, in many cases a smartphone, must be at least 10Gbps at 5g. However, in what the ITU calls the dense urban test environment, users can expect a download speed of 100Mbit/s and an upload speed of 50Mbit/s. However, the details of this test environment are unknown.

According to the latest concept, masts must operate on a spectrum of at least 100MHz. They must also be able to scale up to a width of 1GHz if necessary, the International Telecommunication Union writes.

The million connected devices per square kilometer is not so much in anticipation of such high population densities, but rather in the proliferation of IoT devices. Theoretically, in the future, every electronic device would have a variant that is connected to the internet. In this way, it would become feasible much earlier to connect one million devices per square kilometer.

Although it is a concept, the ITU has great confidence in this state of affairs. In their reporting, they state that the concept is expected to be finalized in November of this year. After that, testing and implementation can actually begin. By 2020, 5g should actually be put into practice.