American telecom network operator Verizon on Tuesday announced its plans to conduct 5G field technology trials in 2016.

The commercial launch of 5G is expected in 2020. By 2025, Juniper Research forecasts, there will be just 240 million 5G connections.

Incidentally, Verizon is the first company to introduce 4G LTE about six years ago.

4G Americas on 5G spectrum

# Mobile spectrum bands below 6 GHz will be valuable to allow integration of4G and 5G systems

# Spectrum bands in the range above 6 GHz will offer technical challenges

# A variety of bands are needed to address coverage and capacity needs of 5G systems

5G technology is expected to hit the U.S. telecom market sometime after 2020. Verizon, which competes with AT&T, is accelerating the expected rate of innovation. By working closely with key partners, Verizon aims to launch trials next year.

Verizon, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Nokia, Qualcomm and Samsung kicked-off the inaugural Verizon 5G Technology Forum last month, and have established working teams to ensure an aggressive pace of innovation.

5G network environments are being created in Verizon’s Waltham, Mass., and San Francisco Innovation Centers.

“We feel a sense of urgency to push forward on 5G and mobilize the ecosystem by collaborating with industry leaders and developers to usher in a new generation of innovation,” said Roger Gurnani, executive vice president and chief information and technology architect for Verizon.

5G will offer about 50 times the throughput of current 4G LTE, latency in the single milliseconds, and the ability to handle exponentially more Internet-connected devices to accommodate the expected explosion of the Internet of Everything.

Verizon wants to repeat its success with LTE roll outs. At present more than 98 percent of the U.S. population has access to 4G LTE and 87 percent of Verizon Wireless data traffic is carried over the network.

Baburajan K
[email protected]