The past year to year and a half has seem the mass adoption of 4G cellular phones as the primary choice of consumers. Practically every smartphone sold today supports 4G, and shipments of smartphones continue to soar (rising by 32% in Q2 2012). At the same time, all of the major US cellphone companies are expanding their 4G coverage, reaching a wide audience than ever before. You might think that with 4G only recently widely adopted, it would be too early to start thinking about the next great thing. You'd be wrong; according to Professor Tafozolli at the University of Surrey, ""4G for us is old hat. We started working on 4G 10 years ago." What this means is that while consumers are enjoying fast 4G service, researchers are moving ahead to the next great thing: 5G. As he explains, "mobile data traffic is soaring". Tafozolli says that his goals for 5G is that is it considerably faster than 4G (data traffic doubles every two years, but 4G can't keep up with that) while ultimately being more power-efficient. He says that 5G will be widely in place by 2020. This sounds like quite the challenge, but the improvements that we've seen over the past eight years are similarly phenomenal. Wikipedia mentions that other key features will be full use of IPv6 and support for connectivity across multiple wireless access technologies simultaneously. It's a refreshing sight to see innovation continue to march forward. Given the patent wars that are increasingly commonplace in the mobile market (which I believe suppress innovation), it's promising to see research universities do what they do best (now just wait for Apple to copy 5G and sue everyone else). Stay tuned for further developments!
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