For all of the hype surrounding fifth generation (5G) wireless, it's pretty easy to forget that there isn't actually a 5G standard yet. That of course hasn't stopped countless companies from promising the moon, sea, sky, and gigabit wireless by sometime next year, despite the fact that nobody has really agreed on what 5G even means yet. Verizon has perhaps been the colorguard of this particular hype parade, promising anyone who'll listen that it's already seeing gigabit speeds in lab tests, and that it expects to have some kind of commercial launch in 2017.
More realistically, most analysts doubt we'll see faster, lower-latency 5G service until well after 2020.
Speaking last week at the CTIA trade show, AT&T SVP of wireless network architecture and design Thomas Keathley made it clear that actually having a 5G standard might be a good idea.
“Ideally, if we can accelerate the actual standard … we can be out to market faster with that technology,” said Keathley.
Last June the 3GPP announced that it had agreed on a “detailed workplan for Release-15, the first release of 5G specifications," though they also pegged 2018 as a possible release data for the actual standard. That's in part because there's still some debate on what technologies fifth generation wireless will actually incorporate. These disagreements span the globe, with numerous carriers and hardware vendors forging a variety of different sects pushing for their own unique vision of what 5G should be when it finally emerges.
Last month, AT&T announced that it was seeing speeds up to 14 Gbps in the labs, though it remains entirely unclear just how fast 5G will be -- and how much it will cost you -- when the service finally arrives years from now.