Verizon will launch field trials of 5G wireless technology in 2016

In an announcement made on September 8, bigwig US wireless carrier Verizon said that it has efforts underway to launch field trials of its 5G wireless technology in 2016. The new technology is expected to become widely available to US consumers by 2020.

According to the announcement, Verizon will start testing the 5G wireless technology with a number of partners next year. The companies with which Verizon is partnering for the 5G trials include Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco Systems, Ericsson, Nokia Networks, Qualcomm, and Samsung.

With Verizon readying 5G wireless network for trials in 2016, the company's officials have said that throughput offered by 5G will be as much as 50 times higher than the throughput of presently-in-use 4G LTE wireless network. The officials also said that the 5G network's latency will drop into the single milliseconds.

Moreover, as per the Verizon officials, the 5G wireless network will play a significant role in the fast-growing Internet of things (IoT) market, especially since the traffic created by the increasing number of connected devices over the world's wireless networks will likely witness a boom in the future.

About the 5G-related efforts being made by Verizon and its partnering companies, Roger Gurnani - Verizon's executive vice president and chief information and technology architect - said: "Collectively we are bringing to bear an incredible amount of resources and intellectual capital to introduce the next generation of wireless technology."