Europe Follows UK to Develop Future 5G Mobile Broadband for 2020

The European Commission (EC) has today committed £43 million (€50m) to help research future 5G (5th Generation) based Mobile Broadband technologies for launch by 2020, which could one day deliver peak service speeds of up to 10Gbps or possibly even 100Gbps (Gigabits per second).

The development mirrors the UK government’s commitment of £35 million last year to establish a new collaborative international research centre (5G Centre), which would also work to develop the next generation of mobile technology (here).

The communications regulator, Ofcom, has already indicated that the 700MHz or possibly even the 600MHz bands could be used for related services (here). But at present both are currently being used to support Digital Terrestrial TV (DTTV) services, which would first need to be moved and all this could take until 2018 to complete.

Neelie Kroes, EC Vice President, said:

“I want 5G to be pioneered by European industry, based on European research and creating jobs in Europe – and we will put our money where our mouth is.”

Overall the EU claims to have already invested more than €700 million into the research of future networks (i.e. from 2007 to 2013) and half of that has been allocated to wireless technologies, contributing to the development of 4G and beyond.

The EU claims that by 2020 worldwide mobile traffic alone will reach a 33 times increase compared to the 2010 figures and once that happens we’ll need to go beyond 4G. Technology never stands still for long.