Researchers have achieved wireless speeds of 1 Tb per second

Researchers at the University of Surrey in England have reached 5G speeds of 1 Terabit per second (Tbps) over the distance of 100 metres in the lab - so far the fastest wireless connection to date. The 5G, or fifth generation, mobile network will ultimately replace our present 4G technology, with its reasonably poxy speeds of about 15 Mbps, and it's expected that it will revolutionize how we use our mobile devices.  It’s previously been projected that speeds of 50 Gbps could be attained on the 5G network, but now the University of Surrey’s 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) has gone and cracked those hopes. Professor Rahim Tafazolli, the administrator of 5GIC, cryptically told Dan Worth for UK technology news site V3. “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.”

To put that into viewpoint, a US Internet provider last year rolled out the fastest home Internet ever in the Minnesotan city of Minneapolis, which reaches speeds of 10 Gbps. So this would be 100 times faster - which means you could download around 100 feature films in less than a second and stream multiple TV shows at once - all from your phone.However, we’re still a long way from showing that these speeds could be achieved in the real world. The tests were conducted in lab conditions over a distance of 100 metres, using transmitters and receivers created at the university.



The team is now hoping to trial the wireless connection outside of the lab and onto the university campus over the next two years. If all goes to plan they want to open it up to the public in 2018. But even though the researchers have achieved such impressive speeds, their focus now is on improving the latency, the time it takes for information to travel to its location, and the reliability of the system.

“We need to bring end-to-end latency down to below one millisecond so that it can enable new technologies and applications that would just not be possible with 4G.”


Bring on the future.

Credit: Umer Arbra

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