Verizon on Tuesday announced plans to roll out field trials of its 5G wireless technology by next year.
According to a press release, Verizon said that 5G network environments, known as sandboxes, are already being created in Waltham, Massachusetts, and San Francisco.
“5G is no longer a dream of the distant future,” said Roger Gurnani, executive vice president and chief information and technology architect for Verizon. “We feel a tremendous sense of urgency to push forward on 5G and mobilize the ecosystem by collaborating with industry leaders and developers to usher in a new generation of innovation.”
Though industry consensus holds that a 5G standard and accompanying technology won’t become publicly available until 2020 or beyond, the carrier said it has partnered with Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm and Samsung in a 5G Technology Forum to promote faster innovation and bring the technology to trials next year.
The forum also includes a number of venture capital groups from across the country focused on a variety of emerging technologies.
“Each partner is a leader, but together we represent more than $50 billion in annual research, development and technology investments and thousands of patents,” Gurnani said. “Collectively we are bringing to bear an incredible amount of resources and intellectual capital to introduce the next generation of wireless technology.”
According to Verizon, the benefits of the next generation network will include “about 50 times the throughput of current 4G LTE, latency in the single milliseconds, and the ability to handle exponentially more Internet-connected devices to accommodate the expected explosion of the Internet of Everything.”
Verizon’s announcement appears to be consistent with history, particularly the development of the current 4G standards and technology.
In 2008, Verizon began 4G testing with a 10-cell network sandbox near Boston, and followed the first LTE data call in August 2009 with a national launch of the technology in 39 major metropolitan areas and 60 major airports in December 2010. By August 2011, Verizon’s 4G LTE network covered 160 million people in 117 cities and today more than 87 percent of the carrier’s wireless data traffic is carried over the network.
