5gbps
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5Gbps broadband is coming to Britain, for £399 per month
Words like "superfast" and "ultrafast" are thrown around all the time to describe UK home broadband. Of course, what we really want to know are the cold, hard numbers. Download and upload speeds, man. That's why Gigaclear has us champing at the bit with its latest announcement -- it's trialling 5Gbps broadband, right now, with a small group of customers in Oxfordshire. If you've never heard of Gigaclear before, we don't blame you. The company was founded in 2010 and only operates in 36 rural communities, spread across five English counties. You can check your postcode here, but the chances of you falling under its custom fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network are slim. And even if you own one of the 10,000 homes with Gigaclear access, you'll have to pay some serious cash for the faster speeds. The company will be charging £399 per month for homeowners and £1,500 for businesses when the trial expands to all Gigaclear customers next year. Got a Scrooge McDuck pile of cash in your basement? Otherwise, this is all just a pipe dream.
Multi-gigabit wireless broadband within our grasp, capped data plans laugh in our face
Bring it on, LTE-Advanced. In case you've been looking for ways to eat up your capped data plan any faster, a researcher from Samsung proclaims that speeds up to 5.5gbps (yes, with a g) might be reachable within the next five years -- as long as all the stars align, that is. Jerry Pi demonstrated the idea, which involves the use of millimeter wave spectrum that lies between 3GHz and 300GHz. If -- and that's a big if -- the spectrum can be secured, the next hurdle will be the engineering challenge of deploying a wireless broadband network at such high frequencies; even tiny oxygen molecules, let alone walls and trees, would easily break up a signal at that range. Pi mentions that he and his fellow researchers are working on a few ideas to get around these obstacles, and outlines everything in significant detail in his 100+ slide presentation, which can be accessed below. Don't get us wrong: the idea of broadband data speeds hitting 5.5gbps makes us salivate, but it would definitely need to come with an unlimited plan. Just sayin'.
