IBM, Ericsson To Design Faster-speed 5G Antennas

IBM Corp. and Ericsson announced a partnership on Monday to jointly research and design 5G antennas. The antennas, a notch up from 4G, would provide customers with increased data speeds as consumers continue to buy more mobile devices and demand more bandwidth. Ericsson estimates that growth of mobile data traffic will be ten times its current level by 2019. The companies hope to build a prototype that is competitive to existing cable and wired-Internet access speeds and more flexible than existing mechanical antennas. IBM said the antennas, which would be electrically steerable, would be "orders of magnitude faster than what" is available today.