Everyone who enjoyed the Indy 500 just recently staged at Indianapolis Motor Speedway (IMS) over the Memorial Day weekend knows that it's home to some of the fastest cars around. Now, IMS is home to a whole new kind of speed in next generation communications as well, while Verizon (News - Alert) is actively testing 5G in the area around IMS known as Speedway.
Speedway is, at last report, one of just 11 places where Verizon is actively testing its 5G next generation communications technology, a technology that's expected to do just about everything from close the rural connectivity gap to provide ultra-powerful new Internet access to deliver a host of new technologies along with it.
Service is expected to be almost unobtrusive, with homes able to get Internet service—and high-quality service as well—without a lot of installation hassles, such that moving and getting new service depends only on taking a box the size of a breadbox with you. That assumes, of course, you move to an area that also has 5G access, which will hopefully be a great many more areas to come going forward.
This is, however, a comparatively new technology, and a substantial step up from even LTE (News - Alert). So testing must be done to figure out how it all works and how things like trees and hills affect the signal. Testing is thus being done in a variety of places like urban apartments, single-family homes like those found in Speedway, and even places like Denver, where mountains might well slow or prevent the signal altogether.
So why does anyone need that kind of speed? Well, any of us who have run into a bandwidth cap lately for our current Internet service provider likely already know what we would do with that. It goes well beyond that, however, into a variety of new areas. Verizon actually set up its own house in Speedway equipped with 5G access, featuring streaming games, streaming video, a virtual reality set, and smart home features as well.
There are a variety of other uses from there to consider—perhaps not least of which is injecting actual competition into the local market for ISP service, a development that likely has many current providers sweating bullets—but it's easy to say that, once 5G emerges, plenty of uses will be found for it if these don't already exist. The demand for Internet service only grows with each passing year, and when 5G comes around, there will likely be applications to come that were only waiting for the bandwidth to support them.
Edited by Alicia Young