5G coming to Cardiff on July 3rd 2019

Its official, Vodafone is launching 5G on July 3rd 2019 and Cardiff is one of only seven launch cities across the UK. As a tech geek, I’m ridiculously excited for this. 5G is the platform required for a tech boom equivalent to the industrial revolution.

So why is 5G so good and why is it keeping me awake at night?

The simplest way to describe 5G is speed, and lots of it. Download speeds will be in the region of 1GB per second. Let’s take a moment to think about that and the possibilities it opens up….

Your home broadband probably doesn’t get 100MB per second and 5G is talking about a 10 times faster download speed. In non-geek talk, it means you can download a film in ONE SECOND. My prediction is that in the future we won’t have traditional phone lines or fibre going into our houses, instead we’ll have a 5G router supplying our broadband. No more digging up roads or unsightly telegraph poles. From a business perspective, think of all those companies in the city centres such as Cardiff that don’t have fibre today without an expensive ethernet connection / leased line, or the construction industry working on remote sites with no broadband access. Overnight they’ll have fast, affordable internet through devices such as the Vodafone Gigacube (Call for prices).

The other amazing thing about 5G is the latency speed of the connection. This is critical for the internet of machines such as driverless cars to communicate with the mothership or surgeons to perform operations remotely. The low latency speed means the cars and robots can act instantly to the commands we send them.

On the other end of the scale our smartphones will benefit from the 5G speeds keeping us working while out in the field. You will need a compatible 5G handset with some already available from Samsung, OnePlus, Huawei and let’s not forget the lovely folding Huawei Mate X.

I just hope the networks play ball and start offering the larger data allowances we’ll all need at reasonable prices. At launch, Vodafone has agreed to not add a 5G tax to their tariffs and will be offering 5G at the same price as 4G which is a promising start. EE is yet to announce its tariffs and they are also launching in Cardiff later this year.

Keep in touch for up-to-date pricing from a Blend Telecom sales team member. The kettle is always on and ready to make a brew. Blend Telecom are approved resellers for Vodafone, EE and O2 offering mobile contracts to business customers in South Wales.

Post by Jay Birch – Blend telecom’s MD