Mobile transfer speeds hit 1Tbps over 5G

If you curse the speed of your mobile data connection, prepare to shake with fury, turn green with envy, and yearn for a time machine. Forget 3G, forget 4G; at the University of Surrey in the UK, researchers have harnessed the power of 5G to establish a data transfer rate of one terabit per second.

At this speed it would be possible to download a Blu-ray quality video in under a second, but it's likely to be some time before we have the chance to experience these sorts of speeds via our handsets.

The 5G Innovation Centre may have been able to achieve this staggering data transfer rate, but it could be another five years or more before the technology is ready for the big time. The record-breaking 5G speed is over 65,000 times faster than what can be hit over 4G and was achieved under laboratory conditions, and we're unlikely to see a public demonstration until 2018.

Talking to V3, 5G Innovation Centre director Professor Rahim Tafazolli said that the transfer speed was reached using custom-built hardware over a distance of 100m and was the result of several different lines of development:

We have developed 10 more breakthrough technologies and one of them means we can exceed 1Tbps wirelessly. This is the same capacity as fiber optics but we are doing it wirelessly.

Looking to a future of yet-to-be-imagined applications, Tafazolli explained that one of the aims with 5G is to reduce latency to less than one millisecond.

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