China begins 5G trials in 100 cities

NEW DELHI: China has started conducting 5G trials in 100 cities as it aims to head start in the race to lead the next generation of cellular phone systems.

"The high-speed 5G networks are theoretically capable of transmitting data 20 times faster than current 4G speed with less than one tenth of the latency. The country’s ministry of (MIIT) began testing the next-gen technology earlier this year with an aim of commercializing it by 2020M" according to PTI report.

Given the speedy trials, it is now expected that the test work will be completed by 2018 and domestic telecom service providers will try to commercialize the 5G technology in the following two years.

The high-speed network will be able to achieve speeds at up to 20 gigabits per second, faster than the current fourth generation speed of 1 Gbps. Whereas, latency or the time required for a request for data to receive a reply when clicking an app, is envisioned to be one millisecond or less on 5G, compared with 10 millisecond on 4G.

China has more than 905 million mobile Internet users and about 380 million are 4G users. Commercial rollout of the improved network will eventually boost the number of both new and existing subscribers who make the big switch.