It’s been a long time coming, but there’s finally a finished 5G standard. Earlier this week, the 3GPP – the international group that governs cellular standards – officially signed off on the standalone 5G New Radio (NR) spec. It’s another major step toward next-generation cellular networks finally becoming a reality.
Now, if you’ve been paying attention to the cellular industry, this may sound familiar and for good reason: the 3GPP also announced a finished 5G standard in December 2017. The difference is that the December specification was for the non-standalone version of 5G NR, which would still be built on top of existing legacy LTE networks. The agreed-upon specification from this week is the standalone version of 5G, which allows for new deployments of 5G in places that didn’t necessarily have that existing infrastructure.
I think a lot of people didn’t realise how fast of the pace we have in the last 10 years.
While we have 3G in 2008, no one were really using it 9 ( Apart from Japan ). It wasn’t until iPhone 3G, and 3GS did the data usage become a thing. We basically moved from 2G/3G Network to end of 4G Network and introduction of 5G in mere 10 years.
I don’t know how Jobs convinced carriers to stop pushing their silly “Portals” (read: walled gardens full of overpriced junk) and let us access The Real Internet for a reasonable price, I am just glad he did.
In Greece, back in 2010 the carrier cashier had to register my LG Optimus 2X as an iPhone 3GS so that I would qualify for the biggest subsidy in a plan that included a reasonable amount of data.
Edited 2018-06-16 22:03 UTC
Don’t be so US-centric… I, and quite a few others, were already using mobile internet connection to access full web in 2007.
I’ll be waiting for the idiotic sales talk that’ll appear when they start claiming 5G can do theoretical speeds in the real world….