Verizon CEO Envisions 5G Smartphones That Will Last A Month Per Charge

Looking ahead to the next generation of wireless technology, 5G is expected to usher in much faster download speeds, allowing for higher quality streaming and potentially online gaming with less lag. The speed bump is reason enough to be excited for the eventual 5G roll out to the masses, but it's not the only one. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam thinks a side effect of 5G's benefits will be vastly improved battery life, with mobile devices lasting a month before needing to be recharged.

McAdam made the surprising (and bold, quite frankly) prediction during a chat IBM CEO Ginni Rometty at IBM's Think 2018 conference this week. His reasoning for thinking that smartphones will be able to last up to four weeks in between charges boils down to the massive latency improvements 5G is expected to bring, with McAdam saying it will drop from 100ms to less than 1ms on upgraded networks.

The latency drop alone won't improve battery life, but according to McAdam , it will enable battery-draining "computing power" to be moved off the device and to the edge of the mobile network. This is something he says will benefit smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices alike.

"By the way, in an IoT setting 5G will have 10-year battery life. And we expect that in a mobile phone environment, you'll probably charge your phone once a month," McAdam said.

McAdam is obviously excited about the prospect of transitioning to 5G, which he also says will usher in the fourth industrial revolution. He also claims Verizon will be able to save cities 70 percent of their energy usage, by way of being able to connect 1000 times more devices to every cell site, thus enabling smart lighting and other smart technologies that save energy.

Hit the source link to check out more of what he had to say (fast forward to around the 31-minute mark, or the 32m40sec mark for his remarks on latency and battery life).

Thumbnail and Top Image Source: Flickr via Kārlis Dambrāns