Gadgetory

with the growth of the internet we're all demanding and we all want faster mobile data and one of the technologies hopes to bring that to light is five genes in practical terms how is 5g going to actually get to your phone while you're moving around Nokia are showing off some technology here at Mobile Congress in Barcelona that it hopes could one day do just that so one of the challenges if you want to send loads and those are data is that you need a lot of bandwidth to do it and that might require finding frequency bands that aren't currently in use today now what nokia is talking about today is a 70 gigahertz band and while that gives you loads of bandwidth to play with the problem is when the bandwidth gets higher the waves don't actually travel as far now Nokia's solution that is to use a dielectric lens antenna which squashes that beam down to something that's much more focused and you get a beam that travels a lot further as a result so the next trick is to get that focus beam to actually stay on you so you can keep getting 5g even when you're for example moving around town so what Nokia's demo here shows is a device that's moving across this room and the base station over there as illustrated by those little red lights shows how the signal is tracking to that device as it's moving so the result is that you can get five GT or smartphone Nokia says if you're a hundred and twenty meters away 95% of people should get speeds of one gigabit per second so this narrow beam technology does face some obstacles and I really mean obstacles things like houses cars walls corners these are things that those narrow beams are going to really struggle to cope with Nokia suggests that a potential workaround for that could be that if that beam losses you your 5g signal could fall back onto more established technology although you could experience a speed drop in that situation so 5g is still years away Nokia is committing to the date 2020 but it's really cool to see some actual practical applications for how 5g could work I'm Lou estrosi net and check out cnet.com slash for much much more