BARCELONA, Spain – It looks like 5G is here!

BARCELONA, Spain – It looks like 5G is here! At least that’s what it looked like if you wandered around Mobile World Congress 2016 this week. Booths filled with information about the next-generation wireless standard — some even offering “demonstrations” of the technology — seemed to occupy more floor space even than new smartphones

But the reality is that the successor to 4G cellular service is still, according to best estimations, around five years from connecting devices around the world

So why, then, was 5G the talk of Barcelona’s big international tech conference now?

The idea of 5G needed no inventing, per se: We’ve all known for a while that “5” would come after “4.” But what the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) Alliance did shortly after last year’s MWC was release something called the “5G White Paper” to lay out what 5G wireless will look like in terms of speed. (Assuming, of course, that consumer companies and hardware vendors can cooperate.)

In that paper, the alliance announced the next mobile data standard should be capable of a healthy 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). Yep: With 4G speeds in the U.S. today averaging somewhere between 5 and 12 megabits per second (Mbps), 5G will look to improve upon its predecessor by up to 200 times

You’re probably psyched to imagine how fast apps, video, and other data will download or stream over 5G. But the idea of imminent gigabit mobile data is even more exciting for wireless infrastructure companies such as Qualcomm and Cisco. (After all, they’ll be ones who’ll have to upgrade that infrastructure to the new standard.) This year’s Mobile World Congress gave these brands the first big international stage where they could trot out their moonshot ideas for the potential new tech. And trot they did

Intel, for example, introduced a new 5G partnership with Ericsson to further advance the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT)