(c)iStock.com/Hin255
Verizon has partnered with several major technology companies to accelerate the development and deployment of 5G networks. The company plans to begin field trials in 2016 and has formed collaborative working groups with Alcatel‑Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm and Samsung through Verizon’s 5G Technology Forum. The forum also includes venture capital groups from both coasts to support growth in emerging technologies.
Roger Gurnani, Verizon’s executive vice president and chief information and technology architect, emphasized the scale of the collaboration: “Each partner is a leader, but together we represent more than $50 billion in annual research, development and technology investments and thousands of patents.”
Verizon is building 5G network test environments at facilities in Waltham and San Francisco to advance the technology. 5G is expected to deliver dramatically higher throughput—potentially up to 50 times the capacity of today’s 4G LTE networks—while reducing latency to the single-digit milliseconds. Those improvements are designed to support the rapid expansion of the Internet of Everything (IoE), which will connect exponentially more devices.
Today, roughly 98% of the U.S. population has access to 4G LTE, and 87% of Verizon Wireless data traffic travels on that network. Cisco’s Visual Networking Index projected that average 4G speeds in the U.S. would grow from about 12.3 Mbps in 2014 to roughly 23.8 Mbps by 2019. By comparison, theoretical peak download speeds for 5G are expected to reach around 10 Gbps versus 1 Gbps for 4G, while latency could drop from approximately 50 milliseconds on 4G to about 1 millisecond on 5G.
Verizon’s business in connected devices has been expanding as well. The company reported more than 15 million Internet of Things (IoT) connections in 2014, with telematics and IoT revenues near $585 million that year. In the first half of 2015, revenue from that segment approached $320 million. Verizon has undertaken similar collaborative initiatives in the past, including efforts to deploy 4G LTE through its Verizon Innovation program.