South Korean telco SK Telecom Co. has announced that it will be demonstrating the world’s first functioning fifth-generation (5G) at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week.

The company’s 5G platform is said to provide a data speed of up to 20 Gigabits per second (Gbps), some 200 times faster and with 1,000 times more data capacity than the current 4G LTE network, and meets the speed requirement set by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for the next generation of mobile phone networks.

SK Telecom’s as yet to be named technology was built in collaboration with Nokia Corp. and Intel Corp.

According to local media, the system allows a user to download a 2-gigabyte movie in less than 1 second and an 18-gigabyte ultra-high-definition (UHD) video in 7.5 seconds, whereas with existing LTE networks it takes 8 minutes to download a UHD content and 2 hours and 47 minutes with a 3G service.

“The commercialization of a 5G service is expected to allow users to transfer high volume data in a speedy manner, enabling the implementation of virtual reality, three-dimensional hologram, and telemedicine technologies,” the report noted.

5G emergent

The news comes at the same time AT&T announced its public roadmap for 5G, although their network, which has been developed in conjunction with Ericsson and Intel Corp., would appear to be behind SK Telecom’s network, with field tests not expected to start until the end of the year.

As we’ve covered previously there’s a mad dash to be the first to build a 5G platform, with the company who is able to successfully build one first likely to be sitting pretty for standardization certification by the ITU, and hence will own the technology that will power the next generation of mobile communications.

Verizon Wireless is another company that wants a slice of the action, but like AT&T seem to be behind SK Telecom’s technology and is still at least 9 months out from a field test, although likewise as of September they are predicting a broad roll out in 2017.

For its part, SK Telecom isn’t being shy about demonstrating what its existing, working 5G platform is capable of, and plans to demonstrate the network at MWC by showing a three-dimensional hologram of Barcelona’s major tourist attraction sites to demonstrate just how much data throughput their system has to offer.

It will be interesting to see just how good it is this time next week.

Stay tuned to SiliconANGLE for all the latest news from #MWC16 as and when it happens.

Image credit: lge/Flickr/CC by 2.0