Typical speeds: 100-600 megabits down, much less up. 

The new "2 gig peak" chips from Huawei and Qualcomm deliver about the same speed with a similar number of antennas and the same spectrum. You can't get much more speed without breaking the Laws of Physics, whether you call it 4G or 5G.

The real 5G uses perhaps ten times as much spectrum for practical speeds over a gigabit. You can only find 800 MHz free at millimeter wave ranges, mostly 26-30 GHz. I and most others consider Massive MIMO, 64-256 antennas, also 5G.

Early in 2017, the marketing people started to call 3.5 GHz "4G" TDD LTE "5G" even though the speed was almost the same. The result is what Dan Jones calls Faux 5G and I call Fake 5G.

The software tweak (NR New Radio) did little for the speed although NR offers other features. The marketing people love the name 5G and stuck it on everything. 

Don't believe the hype.

4G LTE with Massive MIMO as fast as 5G 3.5 GHz

Qualcomm's simulations are respected and the most accurate predictions available. They are consistent with other data. I've come to similar conclusions from expectations of the technology. One possible update to come: The results from Verizon's tests at 28 GHz are very good so far, and may raise performance estimates for millimeter wave. 

Topologies vary. There's no way to predict perfectly the number of users, distances, window and tree interference, and trees, window glass, trucks passing by and other crucial factors. Simulating wireless networks is an art, not a science, and requires great skill.

Good models are crucial for planning actual deployments. I've used the actual Alcatel and Ericsson deployment models, which are very rich. Everyone in the business has learned models will never get everything right, but are an essential starting point. 

Large wireless networks take two years to get started and more than five years to substantially complete.

Huawei's $B 5G chipset delivers a "peak" of 2.0 gig download at 3.5 GHz; Qualcomm's Snapdragon X24 LTE 4G "peaks" at 2 Gig. 

"Who needs fiber?" everyone was asking. Grahame Lynch predicted three years ago that wireless would be fast enough that the fiber broadband network was unnecessary. It's not that simple, but the new wireless certainly will be enough for many.

The $B Balong 5G01 is a remarkable achievement and big news. The release is below: It's a mainstream, 3GPP standard chip that's very similar to the advanced chips of leaders Qualcomm, Intel, and Apple. The processor cores are ARM. They showed off working routers for both < 6 GHz and mmWave. There are different chips for the two frequency ranges. These are first generation chips; second generation, due later in 2018, will be smaller. They expect routers for sale this year and phones in 2019.

December added 12M data users to 344M with 700M 2G feature phones the next target.

Rishi Tejpal, new telecom lead at Economic Times, introduced some dramatic projections in his first article. Bharti, Jio, and Voda/Idea intend to introduce 4G smartphones at 500 rupees, less than $10 U.S. He estimates that would require subsidies of ~$30/phone. The result: over 200M Indians will switch to 4G with Internet connections. I believe $5B for customer acquisition is modest compared to the $10's of billions each of the companies is spending for robust networks. (Jio and the others will generally offer >15 megabit downloads by the end of this year. Their state of the art 5G networks are bringing cost per bit so low they can make money at prices the West think remain impossible.)

Depending on how you count 2G and 3G mobile connections, India either soon will have more Internet connections than the U.S. population of 326M or may have already done so. Soon, India will have twice as many people connected at broadband speeds as the U.S., mostly on wireless. A dynamic private sector led by Reliance Jio is complemented by the sensible public buildout to over 300,000 villages. Both are moving quickly.

Verizon wants 25 ms switchover for large customers needing reliability.

Verizon is planning at least hundreds of thousands of 5G mmWave cells, many of which will be backhauled using NG-PON2 from Calix. (Below.) Recently, Brett Feldman of Goldman Sachs projected Verizon is spending $20B over the next several years; from different sources, I came to a similar conclusion last year.

"Verizon's announcement is legitimizing NG-PON2," Carl Russo of Calix asserts. "It's the right choice today for 5G and customers who need the failover reliability. Because you can switch wavelengths almost instantly and upgrade easily, it's very attractive for customers with growing demand."

He added, "The cost will come down with volume and time. Today, it's the right choice for many; going forward, we expect a very wide market."

NG-PON2 requires expensive lasers of a kind that haven't been mass produced. A half-dozen companies, Adtran as well as optics specialists, are working furiously to bring down the cost.

If you can't come to New York, watch the IEEE live stream. April 25-27

Ted Rappaport's Brooklyn 5G may be the best event in the industry. Top people come to NYU Wireless, the leading academic 5G center. Speaking to an audience of peers, they bring the latest and most important research. 

Paulraj, Fettweis, Dina Katabi, are among the world's top researchers.In 2014, AT&T's #2 John Stankey and the CTO of NTT DOCOMO Seizo Onoe convinced me 5G was going to be real.  Both are coming back. Folks at that level wouldn't have flown from around the world unless 5G was closer than I thought.

Vestberg of Verizon: "2G to 3G, probably 10x better to handle data and 3G to 4G 10x at least. And minimum, I would say, 4G to 5G is the same."

"Will we be able to keep up with wireless growth?" I asked Hans Vestberg back when D.C. was screaming spectrum crisis. "Yes we will. I'm confident human ingenuity will deliver what we need," he replied. "That's always been true in wireless."

Years later, wireless speeds worldwide are much higher; congestion in the developed world remains an exception. Telcos continue spending $billions on advertising to find enough customers to fill their nets.

Without much more spectrum or many more cells, improved technology alone will cover likely demand until 2024 or 2026. (My calculation.) Putting to use currently fallow spectrum and modestly more density, wireless networks are good until 2030 or later.

Hans Vestberg of Verizon is passing 30M homes without raising capex.

NTT DOCOMO's very respected CTO Seizo Inoe in 2016 called high costs of 5G "a myth" in presentations at the Brooklyn 5G Summit and an IEEE conference in Kuala Lampur. He pointed out that LTE was cheaper than 3G and that much of the 5G would use existing towers and backhaul.

Vestberg, former Ericsson CEO now running Verizon's network, sees mmWave costing $200-400/home passed as they deploy to a quarter of the U.S. (Obviously, some other areas will be more expensive.) He just told a CITI investor conference 5G is

"Massively, massively cheaper than having a fiber all the way to the home to have sort of a beam in the air going to the home."

Verizon has previously said their costs to pass a home with fiber were $700 in 2007 and went down from there, presumably to $400-600. AT&T has confirmed similar as they deploy 15M lines of fiber home. I'm inferring that "massively, massively cheaper" would be $200-$400.