Here's what 5G will look like around town

5G is tipped to hit consumers by 2020, and one of the companies pioneering the new mobile standard already has a prototype base station to show off.

TechRadar was at Huawei's campus in Shenzhen, China where the firm was talking through all its projects, including 5G.

The futuristic antenna, dubbed Ultra Node, could be coming to a rooftop or lamppost near you within the next 10 years, but what exactly 5G will offer is yet to be decided.

A 5G future

5G standards are expected to be finalised at the end of 2015/ the start of 2016, but something it will be able to deliver is rapid data speeds of 10Gbps.

At that speed a HD movie would take just a couple of seconds - yes, seconds - to download. It will offer you a fibre-like connection, but of course without the wires.

You'll also be able to access 8K, 3D video over the superfast network - because 4K clearly isn't good enough - as well as a host of other services currently not supported by the current 2G, 3G and 4G networks.

Offerings such as social gaming, real time 3D streaming, VR and seamless connections on high speed transport are all being touted.

It's not just our mobiles which will benefit from the 5G network, with the new standard enabling billions of connections in the Internet of Things.

An example we saw showed off the impressive latency of the 5G network, allowing an autonomous car to make split second decisions to avoid collisions.

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