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The 5G hardware wireless standards are now (mostly) finalized
June 16, 2025
The quest to bring the world true5Gsmartphones and wireless networks reached a major milestone this week. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) officially approved the hardware specifications for the standalone 5G standards, according toa group announcement made via Samsung.
Read more:What is 5G?
The same 3GPP group approved thenon-standalone 5G standards in December 2017. The non-standalone standards are for wireless hardware that will be put in place on top of current LTE networks. This week’s new approval of the standalone 5G standards will be used for all-new wireless networks.
While this is a big move for the eventual launch of true 5G hardware, a research note fromSRG Research and Consulting Services(viaFierceWireless) points out that there are still gaps in the standards that may need to be ironed out over the next several months.
Even with these small details still to come, some companies are already demoing how the new 5G standards will work in the real world. In ajoint statement and video, Verizon Wireless and Nokia announced that they had completed the first 5G connections, using the standards that were just approved, outside at Verizon’s campus in Basking Ridge, NJ, rather than in a lab. Verizon said their outside 5G tests supported multiple and simultaneous virtual reality sessions and 4K streaming video with latencies of 1.5 milliseconds. In addition, Verizon and Nokia said that they used 4CC (component carrier aggregation) to achieve download speeds of up to 1.8 Gbps via 5G networks.
Wireless carriers in the U.S. are slowly gearing up to launch their 5G networks. AT&T claims that 12 cities will have5G support by the end of 2018. Verizon has stated 5G networks will golive in up to five marketsby the end of the year, and T-Mobile claims it will have 5G support in up to30 cities by the end of 2018. For its part, Sprint says it won’t be launching 5G support until thefirst half of 2019. In any case, the first smartphones with 5G modems also won’t likely launch untilsometime in 2019.
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