August is the month for telecom customers in four big U.S. cities to start enjoying the high speeds and greater capabilities of a new 5G wireless network system.
The Verge reports today that Verizon has pushed the button on 5G operations in Atlanta, Detroit, Indianapolis and Washington D.C., four very different cities in which residents can now link up to the new network at dizzying speeds. 5G services have already been introduced in Chicago, Denver, Providence, and Minnesota’s twin cities.
Reports from 5G operations in Chicago cite speeds of up to a gigabit per second, while noting that customers can’t reach those speeds everywhere, and that buildings still provide physical obstructions to signals that are tough for wireless systems to penetrate.
Despite these caveats, users in some parts of the nation’s capital are being wowed by fantastic new wireless speeds, particularly in places like Foggy Bottom, Dupont Circle, the Georgetown Waterfront, the National Mall and Smithsonian areas, and the Navy Yard.
In other cities, the faster signals are similarly concentrated in specific areas and local neighborhoods.
More Americans are now getting a taste of what 5G service looks like, and it’s impressive. The lower latency and higher bandwidth, as well as monumentally faster speeds, enable video streaming that’s more robust and big data connections that promise to empower the next generation of machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies.
In the short term, we’ll see live TV streaming and other services explode. In the long term, we’ll see the Internet of Things utilizing 5G to grow, and data-rich and data-heavy AI interfaces being able to emerge more capably in the new high-speed network.
We’ll keep you apprised of these tech developments as they happen – and as 5G spreads, they will happen quickly!
