The future of mobile data: What is 5G and what is it promising?

5G speeds are set to influence not only how fast we stream films on smartphones, but the connectivity of increasingly high-tech cars. Photo: Andrea Warnecke/dpa

4G mobile phone transmission seems to have only just arrived for most people and yet already all the talk is about the next generation, 5G. That's supposed to be ready for launch by 2020. But how noticeable an improvement will it really be? 

For starters, 5G offers an enormous increase in transmission bandwidth, theoretically 10 gigabits per second (GBit/s) – which is 10,000 megabits per second (Mbit/s). Put simply, imagine downloading an entire 1.25 GB film in one second.