5G Tests Simulated By Qualcomm to Show How Fast Real World Speed Can Be

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., announced key findings from an extensive 5G network simulation the company has conducted over the past several months.

Qualcomm’s tests modeled real-world conditions in Frankfurt and San Fransisco, based on the location of existing cell sites and spectrum allocations in the two cities.

 “There is a lot of interest from various stakeholders in the mobile ecosystem – cloud platform providers, application developers, device OEMs, and others – in understanding the real-world performance that 5G NR mobile networks and devices will deliver,” said Alex Holcman, senior vice president of engineering, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We undertook this comprehensive study to help the ecosystem prepare for the foray into 5G, so that application developers, for example, can begin planning new experiences and services for users with 5G devices.”

Beyond network capacity improvements, the simulation also demonstrated significant user experience gains for 5G NR capable devices when compared with LTE devices, including:

• Browsing download speeds increasing from 56 Mbps for the median 4G user to more than 490 Mbps for the median 5G user, a gain of approximately 900 percent
• Approximately 7x faster responsiveness, with median browsing download latency reduced from 116ms to 17ms.
• File download speeds of 100 Mbps for the 10th percentile 5G user, meaning that 90 percent of 5G users have download speeds of more than 100 Mbps. This is compared to 8 Mbps for the 10th percentile LTE user.
• Median streaming video quality increasing from 2K/30 FPS/8-bit color for LTE users to 8K/120 FPS/10-bit color and beyond for 5G users.