5G 

5G (5th generation mobile networks or 5th generation wireless systems) is a technology used in research papers and projects to denote the next major phase of mobile telecommunication standards beyond the 4G/IMT-Advanced standards. 5G is not officially used for any specification or official document yet made public by telecommunication companies or standardisation bodies such as 3GPP, WiMAX Forum, or ITU-R. New standard releases beyond 4G are in progress by standardisation bodies, but are at this time not considered as new mobile generations but under the 4G umbrella.

Prognosis

The 5G family of ITU standards could be implemented around the year 2020.^[1] A new mobile generation has appeared every 10th year since the first 1G system (NMT) was introduced in 1981, including the 2G (GSM) system that started to roll out in 1992, 3G (W-CDMA/FOMA), which appeared in 2001, and "Real 4G" standards which is set at 1000mbps speeds might be deployed as early as 2013^[2]. Predecessor technologies have appeared on the market a few years before the new mobile generation, for example the pre-3G system CdmaOne/IS95 in 1995, and the pre-4G systems Mobile WiMAX and first release-LTE in 2005 and 2009 respectively.

The development of the 2G (GSM) and 3G (IMT-2000 and UMTS) standards took about 10 years from the official start of the R&D projects, and development of 4G systems started in 2001 or 2002.^[3][4] However, still no transnational 5G development projects have officially been launched, and industry representatives have expressed scepticism towards 5G.^[5]

New mobile technologies are generally assigned new frequency bands and wider spectral bandwidth per frequency channel (1G up to 30 kHz, 2G up to 200 kHz, 3G up to 5 MHz, and 4G up to 40 MHz), but skeptics argue that there is little room for new frequency bands or larger channel bandwidths.^[5] From users point of view, previous mobile generations have implied substantial increase in peak bitrate (i.e. physical layer net bitrates for short-distance communication). However, no source suggests 5G peak download and upload rates of more than the 1 Gbps to be offered by ITU-R's definition of 4G systems.^[3] If 5G appears, and reflects these prognosis, the major difference from a user point of view between 4G and 5G techniques must be something else than increased maximum throughput; for example lower battery consumption, lower outage probability (better coverage), high bit rates in larger portions of the coverage area, cheaper or no traffic fees due to low infrastructure deployment costs, or higher aggregate capacity for many simultaneous users (i.e. higher system level spectral efficiency). Those are the objectives in several of the research papers below.