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Carriers and equipment manufacturers showcase 5G but its biggest advantage is a no-show

By Georgi Zarkov

Updated: Dec 06, 2018, 1:43 AM

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Carriers and equipment manufacturers showcase 5G but its biggest advantage is a no-show

The prototype Samsung smartphone used for one of the 5G demos

Hawaii has been in the focus of the mobile industry’s eyes for the past few days as it’s hosting Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit. One of the products Qualcomm is showing off is its 5G modem, promising to allow our future smartphones to make use of super-fast data speeds of the also future 5G networks. As you can notice, there’s a lot that’s yet to be seen in regards to 5G, so naturally, participants in the tech summit were eager to see what the next-gen technology is capable of.

Those who expected to have their hats blown away by the amazing speeds of 5G were left disappointed, The Verge notes. While manufacturers had indeed set up demo areas with 5G antennas and prototype devices that can make use of them, the speeds at which everything was running were not only far from the expected 5G ones, but even slower than some 4G connections.

As a reminder, 5G promises to deliver data speeds of over 1Gbps, potentially hitting 10Gbps, but at the event, the devices were reaching only around 130-140Mbps. Of course, the companies involved: Qualcomm, Ericsson, Samsung and Verizon had plenty of reasons why this was the case. From limited frequencies they could use to the fact that they just wanted to show that it’s working and that there’s a lot of tinkering and optimization required, there’s plenty of hurdles that stopped the organizers from showing us the true potential of 5G.

We’re sure that’s all true, but it takes the wind out of 5G’s sails when an event that’s meant to promote the new technology fails to show the biggest thing that separates 5G from what we already have ― the blazing fast speed. It seems that we’ll have to patiently wait until all the pieces fall into place and we can be genuinely amazed (hopefully) by what 5G can do.