What a world with 5G will look like

What will a world with 5G look like? Everyone in the wireless industry agrees that 5G is coming by the end of the decade. But what will it be used for? That's still up in the air. 5G will make cars safer to drive. It will make instant replay more instant. And doctors will be able to perform surgery using wirelessly controlled robots. And, yes, 5G will be much faster.

Nokia, aiming to be one of the world's biggest 5G players, claims that it has tested a 5G connection with download speeds of 30 gigabits per second. That's more than 1,000 times faster than your average 4G connection. In the real world, there's very little chance of your phone actually getting speeds that fast. Trees, buildings, your distance from a cell tower and those pesky other customers who are also trying to use the network are going to slow down speeds dramatically from what Nokia was able to achieve in a lab. Still, the wireless industry thinks 5G will be really fast: 10 to 100 times faster than 4G, according to Brian Daly, director of government standards at AT&T. Those faster speeds will also allow more customers to be connected at the same time, giving the network more capacity and making connections more reliable for mobile customers.