Ericsson Trial 10Gbps 5G Mobile Broadband Network in Japan

Mark.JUK (1222360) writes "Japanese mobile operator NTT DOCOMO has announced that they'll make use of Ericsson's advanced antenna technologies and radio base stations in order to conduct one of the world's first trials of a possible 5G based Mobile Broadband technology in Yokosuka (Japan), which aims to deliver downstream speeds of more than 10 Gigabits per second using the 15GHz radio spectrum frequency. But this is just one possible candidate for 5G connectivity and many organizations are still working to try and define an official standard, while most countries don't expect the first services to be deployed until around the year 2020."

$12.50/second!

[Anonymous Coward]

At Verizon's current sell rates for data, 10 Gbps downstream would cost around $12.50 per second. It would cost less for the first few gigs per month because they are selling plans with almost-reasonable per-gig costs now with their "2x more" campaign. So even on the charitable side, if they gave you 100 gigs (gigaBYTES) of data for $2 per gigabyte -- a price that is lower than anything any carrier currently offers aside from grandfathered unlimited plans -- you'd be burning $2.50 per second while downloading at full tilt. You'd exhaust your 100 GB pre-paid data chunk in 40 seconds.

Those of you who think there's no way they'd have the same cost per gigabyte in a 5G world, think again: the "overage" charge per gigabyte has been fixed at $10/GB for a very, very long time now, and it doesn't seem like it's going to change. The only way to get slightly lower per-GB costs is to buy a lot of data in advance, but even their highest tier plan is not "a lot", and it's still way too expensive to be practical for anything but light web surfing.