A couple of weeks ago, Qualcomm gathered a few hundred press and analysts from around the globe and put them in the same room to talk about the company’s future. A huge part of that future involves 5G, and many at Qualcomm were excited to talk about the potential.
It sure didn’t take long for the next big move to be taken, and that’s with the spec’s overlord, 3GPP, having approved the final specs. In case you don’t typically follow spec finalizations too often, these things take a lot of time, so this is in many cases a very major milestone. The final specs will be released later this week, and will cover low and high frequencies – including 50GHz.
With the spec deemed complete, it means that manufacturers and anyone else involved in the ecosystem can begin building whatever they need to, to best support the technology once it’s able to launch. At the aforementioned Qualcomm event, the company talked about how 5G would change our lives, essentially removing the speed roadblock that prevent so many of us from getting things done while on-the-go.
At this point, it’s hard to know what 5G is truly going to deliver when it arrives, because all we have to go on right now are specs on paper. But as previously mentioned, Qualcomm’s been touting 5G as a solution to let us work on the go, and essentially never have to worry about being connected. My weak 500MB plan in east coast Canada tells me that dramatic changes need to happen in some parts of the world before people start using LTE as a Wi-Fi replacement, but things could change given that 5G deployment is still a ways off.
Either way, it’s great to see this milestone reached. The journey is far from over, but it’s at a great point right now.