Will Australia be the first to have a 5G network?

Over the past few years, we’ve heard about 5G mobile connectivity and its incredible possibilities in terms of performance.  But now, Australia is promising to unfold it by 2020 and boast speeds over 1Gbps, according to Vodafone chief technology officer Benoit Hanssen.

Photo courtesy of RCG Wireless

The development of 5G, known as the fifth generation mobile network, has prompted serious investment in worldwide infrastructure due to its extremely fast speeds. Not only is it robust enough to bring crystal clear movies to your smartphone, there’s talk and hope that 5G will be able to provide the backbone for a range of devices from the Internet of Things to driverless cars.

Hanssen believes Australia will be one of the first countries to adopt 5G by 2020, “plus or minus a year here or there.” He noted that the country has a track record of early adoption: “Australia adopted the smartphone enthusiastically — smartphone penetration is one of the highest in the world,” he said. “There is a readiness to adopt new things, and you have a population that can largely afford to adopt new things.”

4G was introduced in Australia around 2011 and is widely used. According to Hanssen, more than 70 percent of Vodafone customers are on 4G phones and he expects it to reach 90 percent this year.

In 2015, Vodafone made a deal with telecommunications service provider TPG to extend its fiber network, which ultimately puts the company in a strong position to introduce 5G. Hanssen said it’s a work in progress and the bulk of the network has yet to be rolled out, but it’s still early and there are plenty of indications Australia is on the path to 5G.

It’s unclear what kind of speeds we can expect with 5G; Vodafone noted it needs broader wireless spectrum to get higher speeds and it, along with other Australian telecomm companies, are currently lobbying the Australian for the right to use additional bandwidth frequency.

Aside from Vodafone, another of Australia’s giant mobile providers, Telstra, has indicated it has plans to move into 5G. Former CEO Andrew Penn confirmed the network aims to bring 5G to Australia by 2020.

“5G addresses the world of an Internet of things,” he said. “You can imagine a world in 2020 where almost anything that could be connected will be connected.”

Source: Mashable