Researchers at the University of Surrey have achieved 5G data speeds in excess of 1Tbps.
The test results proved many thousands of times faster than current existing network speeds, marking a huge a success in the race for 5G standard.
The team was working as part of the university’s 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC), which hopes to demonstrate its new 5G tech to the public by 2018.
What’s more, Ofcom says 5G could be available in Britain by 2020, although it’s not yet clear how widespread this rollout would be.
Speaking to news site V3, Professor Rahim Tafazolli, the director of 5GIC, said: “We have developed 10 more breakthrough technologies and one of them means we can exceed 1Tbps wirelessly.”
“This is the same capacity as fibre optics but we are doing it wirelessly.”
The research team built its on wireless testing set up and clocked the speeds in lab conditions over a 100m distance.
This is key, as lab conditions over such a short distance aren’t actually representative of real world speeds. This is certainly solid progress in the sector, however.
Interestingly, Samsung announced late last year that its own 5G network tests had resulted in speeds of up to 7.5Gbps.
That sort of download pace translated to around 940MB of data chewed every single second, significantly less impressive than Surrey’s new transfer rates.
Related: What is 5G? 5G vs 4G and future of mobile networks
It’s worth noting that the write speeds of current consumer devices couldn’t actually make full use of the University of Surrey’s super-fast connection.
Only very high-end graphics cards have write speeds in excess of 1Tbps offered via their built-in memory.
It is a good sign for things to come however, as higher speeds will almost certainly improve the ability to stream higher resolution content. We’ll also see write speeds of memory progress, further enabling the use of 1Tbps data transfer.
We also should note that there isn’t yet a set standard for 5G networking, and another team could trump these speeds with a different data transfer method.
