Nokia's 5G Tech Too Fast for Current Cellphones to Handle

To say that Nokia's new 5G technology is faster than greased lightning would be a huge understatement.

Imagine a technology so fast that you can download a full-length HD 3-D movie in less than a second, twice as clear and vibrant as anything available today, that outpaces 4G technology by 40 times, that is 25 percent faster than any other cutting-edge data speed developed so far, and you start to get the idea, the Daily Mail reports.

It is so fast that your cellphone can't handle it. In fact, it requires the designing of entirely new cellphone systems, more cellphone towers, or "mini-towers" on virtually every building and perhaps in every room, and the revamping of the world's entire cellphone system, CNN reports.

And it will be some time before you will be able to use it — at least five years — and the system likely will become available first in Europe.

Nokia CTO Hossein Moiin told Mobile World Live that Europe is "the natural place to take leadership" in 5G development.

The U.S. took the lead in 4G development, Moiin said, because, "in the US you have a country of 300 million people and only four operators, but in the EU, where there is around 350 million people, you have many operators," he said. "Such fragmentation of the market does not help the business case for investors. There are no technological barriers. It's just a question of economics and return on investment."

There also are problems with standardization and development of real world networks to be overcome.

"We don't have real common ground, as an industry, on what spectrum we will use — will it be millimeter of centimeter waves — and whether there will be a combination of different radio access technologies.These are some of the fundamental issues we are grappling with," Moiin said.

However, Nokia, in partnership with National Instruments, is pushing onward, as it demonstrated at a Brooklyn technology summit, showing that its new system could reach an amazing speed of 10 Gigabits per second, the Daily mail reported.

"This has led to warnings from analysts that faster downloads could cause larger bills, and raised health fears that new high powered broadcasts will fuel so-called 'electronic smog,'" the Daily Mail notes.

CNN termed the frequency of the Finnish company's new 5G concept "insanely high" and capable of generating a huge increase in traffic which risks overwhelming cellphone company routers.

Lauri Oksanen, vice president of research and technology at Nokia, said, "5G mobile network speeds as high as 10Gbps and with extremely low latency are a driving force for massive mobile broadband and totally new applications in the future programmable world."

Nokia says the new technology will ultimately transfer to applications in cars, entertainment, agriculture and robotics, but admits, "5G will not only require changes in the radio technology, but in the whole network architecture."

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