We're now drawing closer to the day when we'll have faster 5G services to play with, and tech companies are beginning their preparations to catch the wave. The latest entry is Samsung with it's new Exynos 5100 modem.
According to Samsung's claims, this is the first 5G modem that's fully compatible with the industry standard for the technology.
In truth though, the first major 5G modem was Qualcomm¡¯s X50 moden, announced a few years ago. Many companies have already agreed to put it in their future devices, but Samsung prefers to get a jump on the competition by designing its own chip that confirms to 3GPP standards instead of waiting for Qualcomm.
The new Exynos 5100 is compatible with both the sub-6GHz and mmWave parts of the spectrum. It's also backward compatible with older networks like 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE at the same time.
Samsung claims the Exynos 5100 reaches speeds of up to 2Gbps with the sub-6GHz spectrum and up to even 6Gbps using mmWave. Both are significantly higher than numbers currently achieved on 4G.
To make things clearer, that translates to you downloading 0.25GB of data a second and 0.75GB of data per second respectively (with no other users occupying bandwidth of course). That means you'd be able to download a 1080p BluRay version of 'The Avengers: Infinity War¡¯ on your smartphone data connection in under 5 seconds at worst.
Pretty amazing right? Well that's the idea with 5G, to equate it's efficiency with wired broadband so that it becomes a worthwhile expense for the regular user to make. And if everything goes according to plan, we may start seeing 5G networks as early as next year.