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With 5G, you'll be able to download every video on YouTube to your smartphone in just 64 minutes. The download speeds are ten times as fast as 4G.

0.3 GB/s 3G
1 GB/s 4G
10 GB/s 5G

How long will it take to download a
two-hour movie to your smartphone?

  • 3G
  • 4G
  • 5G
  • 3 minutes

    You can download the movie in around the
    time it takes to soft-boil an egg.

  • 1 minute

    You can download the movie in around
    the time it takes to make tea.

  • 5.5 seconds

    You ask out loud "Has the movie downloaded yet?".
    And it's already downloaded.

5G network upgrade

Full throttle for the
new gigabit network

Deutsche Telekom is working on the biggest network upgrade in the history of the company: the buildout for the 5G network. And it's more than just faster.

  • A new, exciting digital age is just around the corner. Today we use the mobile network to make a dinner date with our loved ones or to see whether the shipping confirmation for an online order has already arrived in our inbox. The world of tomorrow will be much different.

    Imagine you're driving down the highway, approaching a curve. Suddenly, your car decelerates to 30 km/h – but you didn't do anything. That's because the car is smarter than we are and knows that dangerous black ice has formed after the curve. The vehicle ahead alerted us, completely automatically of course. The waste bin in the courtyard is never overfilled, because the refuse disposal company always empties it just before it fills up completely – seemingly miraculously. The invisible secret: smart sensors in the waste bin call the refuse disposal company over the 5G network. And when our children enthusiastically tell us about scuba diving in the Caribbean, they're not coming from the airport, but instead from geography class – thanks to 5G.

    The Internet of Things can make our lives easier and perform tasks for us. But for all of this to work, a radical restructuring of the network is needed. While seven billion devices are currently connected to the network, primarily smartphones, it will soon be 500 billion: connected cars, smart devices like sensors in waste bins, parking spaces, streetlights, washing machines, solar panels, door locks, refrigerators, and even beehives. To ensure that they are all reliably connected in the Internet of Things, Deutsche Telekom is innovating, digging, and testing for the largest network upgrade in its history, preparing for the implementation of 5G. It will propel all of us into the gigabit society.

5G – Faster
and greener

  • The new 5G makes electricity smart. Yes, you read that right. Because 5G is also the foundation for the electricity infrastructure of tomorrow, the smart grid. And we need it urgently to get the carbon-heavy coal-fired power plants off the grid and replace them with environmentally solar and wind power. Together with the City of Dresden and TU Dresden, Deutsche Telekom is developing a new test area in the Johannstadt district to test the smart grid.

    Read more

5G - The foundation for
a much more sustainable
kind of mobility

  • Traffic jams and annoying red lights will be history one day, just like many fatal accidents. Because in the future, traffic will conduct itself. In road transportation in particular, 5G will make our lives much easier and safer. Whereas we constantly have to watch the traffic today, we will soon be able to play with our children or read a book as the landscape passes by outside. But until we reach that point, we'll still have to drive many kilometers the old way, which means every German will spend an average of 38 hours per year in traffic jams. That frays your nerves and is expensive, too. A study by the London Centre for Economics and Business Research in 2014 calculated that traffic jams and heavy traffic will cost German consumers 33 billion euros a year in 2030.
  • A vision of safe, congestion-free mobility has been defined – and Deutsche Telekom is developing the foundations for it with the new 5G network. The environment will also benefit. Less traffic congestion means less energy will be needed for acceleration and braking. Deutsche Telekom is already testing the future of mobility on the A9 motorway, on the "Digital test bed Autobahn". Connected cars are already driving automated here and communicating with one another in real time. The project is a clear milestone for Germany's pioneering role in Mobility 4.0.
5G is the foundation for the inter­con­nected traffic of the future. Traffic jams, red lights and crashes will be things of the past, traffic will regulate itself.
What's your opinion? Do you think autonomous cars drive more safely than people?
You
Certainly not Yes, sure

Drag the barometer left or
right in order to vote There are different opinions about this question.
Some of the reads agree with you. Just like you, most of the other readers also believe
that cars are safer when they drive autonomously. Many other readers also lean towards the opinion
that autonomous cars drive more safely. In contrast to you, most other readers lean towards
the opinion that autonomous cars drive more safely. In contrast to you, most other readers believe
that autonomous cars drive more safely. In contrast to you, most other readers believe
that autonomous cars don't drive more safely. In contrast to you, most other readers lean towards
the opinion that autonomous cars don't drive more safely. Many other readers also lean towards the opinion
that autonomous cars don't drive more safely. Just like you, most of the other readers also believe
that cars aren't safer when they drive autonomously.

The secret behind the incredible
performance: slicing

  • If you think faster transmission masts alone are behind the incredible perfor­mance, you're wrong. There are many innovations "under the hood" that make the 5G network a true quantum leap. 5G will not only unify conventional mobile communications with WLAN and other technologies. One important innovation is "slicing", a groundbreaking new develop­ment compared to the Internet we're familiar with: after all, a waste bin that sends an occasional signal when it needs to be emptied needs entirely different network performance than a stadium camera that is transmitting virtual reality content in real time and in high resolu­tion. Running the respective matching infrastructures in parallel would be much too expensive, however, and inter­con­necting them would be far too complex.
  • That's why we're building a physical infra­structure with multiple virtual networks, which run completely separately and independently of one another. The tech­no­logy allocates separate, virtual network slices to the different app­li­ca­tions, whose bandwidth and latency are tailored to their specific requirements. It's as if we had a separate network for each thing or each group of things. This technology is called "network slicing" and is one of the most important elements of 5G. The prin­ciples still have to be developed further, however, until 5G is ready to deploy. What's more, the new technology requires much less energy for a given data rate, making it environmentally friendly. Deutsche Telekom expects that 5G will be ready to launch in 2020.

The challenge: Reconciling three competing requirements

  • Bandwidth
  • Latency
  • Bulk transfers

Blinding speed Extreme download speeds of one gigabyte per second and more will be possible
with 5G. And even when traveling at high speeds, such as on trains.

Ultrafast response In traffic, in particular, whether or not a collision occurs is often a matter of
milliseconds. That's why latency of less than one millisecond is the target of 5G.

Billions of devices The Internet of Things will soon host billions more devices. At
the same time, energy consumption will drop significantly.

Thanks to slicing, 5G will consolidate the performance of three networks in just one physical network.