You remember 3G, have fully embraced the mobile connectivity of 4G and now you might have heard of 5G. 5G will be the next big step in telecommunications-based internet connectivity beyond the current 4G/IMT-Advanced standards which you may even be using to read this blog post right now.

What makes 5G special is that it will have a higher capacity than current 4G, allowing for a higher density of mobile broadband users and support device-to-device, or M2M communications in a way that 4G currently can’t.

Latency is also something that 5G, once launched will improve upon as compared with 4G, along with lower battery consumption on devices, which means that theoretically devices such as phones and tablets will need to be charged less frequently. 5G research and development is currently underway and the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance has a strict list of criteria which the new 5G standard should fill.

Some of the elements of the new standard are faster data rates (unsurprisingly), being able to send 1GB per second to many workers on the same floor simultaneously, many hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections for wireless sensors and enhanced spectral efficiency.

On top of the faster speeds which 5G will offer, it’s also predicted that 5G will meet the needs of completely new use cases, such as the Internet of Things (internet connected devices) and broadcast-like services alongside offering lifeline communications for emergency relief applications.

Excited? We are too, but we’ll have to wait, because a lot of research and development is still taking place and 5G roll out isn’t planned to begin until 2020. The implications that 5G will have on virtual offices and remote working will be enormous.