Despite all of the hype that 5G is right around the corner, it’s important to remember that there is not yet a complete standard for the new technology.

The industry just took a big step on February 22 when the ITU released a draft of what it hopes is the final specification for 5G. The document is heavy in engineering detail and is not written for the layman. You will see that the draft talks about a specification for ‘IMT-2020’ which is the official name of 5G. The goal is for this draft to be accepted at a meeting of the ITU-R Study Group in November.

This latest version of the standard defines 13 metrics that are the ultimate goals for 5G. A full 5G deployment would include all of these metrics. What we know that we will see is commercial deployments from vendors claiming to have 5G, but which will actually meet only some parts of a few of these metrics. We saw this before with 4G, and the recent deployment of LTE-U is the first 4G product that actually meets most of the original 4G standard. We probably won’t see a cellular deployment that meets any of the 13 5G metrics until at least 2020, and it might be five to seven more years after that until fully compliant 5G cellular is deployed.

The metric that is probably the most interesting is the one that establishes the goal for cellular speeds. The goals of the standard are 100 Mbps download and 50 Mbps upload. Hopefully this puts to bed the exaggerated press articles that keep talking about gigabit cellphones. And even should the technology meet these target speeds, in real life deployment the average user is probably only going to receive half those speeds due to the fact that cellular speeds decrease rapidly with distance from a cell tower. Somebody standing right next to a cell tower might get 100 Mbps, but even as close as a mile away the speeds will be considerably less.

Interestingly, these speed goals are not much faster than is being realized by LTE-U today. But the new 5G standard should provide for more stable and guaranteed data connections. The standard is for a 5G cell site to be able to connect to up to 1 million devices per square kilometer (a little more than a third of a square mile). This, plus several other metrics, ought to result in stable 5G cellular connections – which is quite different than what we are used to with 4G connections. The real goal of the 5G standard is to provide connections to piles of IoT devices.

The other big improvement over 4G are the expectations for latency. Today’s 4G connections have data latencies as high as 20 ms, which accounts for most problems in loading web pages or watching video on cellphones. The new standard is 4 ms latency, which would improve cellular latency to around the same level that we see today on fiber connections. The new 5G standard for handing off calls between adjoining cell sites is 0 ms, or zero delay.

The standard increases the demand potential capacity of cell sites and provides a goal for the ability of a cell site to process peak data rates of 20 Gbps down and 10 Gbps up. Of course, that means bringing a lot more bandwidth to cell towers and only extremely busy urban towers will ever need that much capacity. Today the majority of fiber-fed cell towers are fed with 1 GB backbones that are used to satisfy upload and download combined. We are seeing cellular carriers inquiring about 10 GB backbones, and we need a lot more growth to meet the capacity built into the standard.

There are a number of other standards. Included is a standard requiring greater energy efficiency, which ought to help save on handset batteries – the new standard allows for handsets to go to ‘sleep’ when not in use. There is a standard for peak spectral efficiency which would enable 5G to much better utilize existing spectrum. There are also specifications for mobility that extend the goal to be able to work with vehicles going as fast as 500 kilometers per hour – meaning high speed trains.

Altogether the 5G standard improves almost every aspect of cellular technology. It calls for more robust cell sites, improved quality of the data connections to devices, lower energy requirements and more efficient hand-offs. But interestingly, contrary to the industry hype, it does not call for gigantic increases of cellular handset data speeds compared to a fully-compliant 4G network. The real improvements from 5G are to make sure that people can get connections at busy cell sites while also providing for huge numbers of connections to smart cars and IoT devices. A 5G connection is going to feel faster because you ought to almost always be able to make a 5G connection, even in busy locations, and that the connection will have low latency and be stable, even in moving vehicles. It will be a noticeable improvement.