2020: Download movies in a second on mobile

5G network for your car, fridge, smartwatch, toothbrush, lightbulb

When the next super-fast mobile network launches in 2020 you will be able to download a high-definition movie in one second flat.

But the future fifth generation, or 5G, network is not really being designed for you.

In fact, it will be built for your car, fridge, smartwatch, toothbrush, lightbulb and a host of other everyday objects to communicate with each other online, a phenomenon known as the Internet of things.

Handling the new traffic is a key challenge for network operators gathering at the four-day Mobile World Congress opening Monday in Barcelona, Spain.

Worldwide data traffic generated by people's mobile devices will multiply 11-fold by 2018, according to US telecommunications equipment manufacturer Cisco.

But the traffic generated between connected objects, so-called machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, will already be greater than all the world's mobile telephones combined by 2015, it said in a study.

Mobile networks will need to boost capacity by 1,000 times by 2020 to cope with the huge growth in M2M traffic if lag time is to be avoided, said Ulrich Dropmann, senior executive at Finnish mobile services group Nokia Solutions Network (NSN).

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