Back in the 1990s access to the Internet for the average person involved a dialup modem that squeaked and burbled to achieve the heady speeds of tens of kilobits per second. If that person was instantly teleported from the 1990s to now, he or she would be amazed at the broadband speeds we now take for granted and even more flabbergasted at being able to watch videos over the Internet without a landline connection.

But despite those significant improvements in fixed line and mobile speeds in the last 30 years with 2024 broadband speeds tens of thousands of times faster than those in 1994, our thirst for speed appears unquenchable with the march of progress apparently unstoppable.

Currently, fibre to the home services are typically provided by a passive optical network (PON) operating at 10 Gigabits per second (Gbit/s). But not satisfied by that, Nokia and Google Fiber have recently trailed a PON operating at 50 Gbit/s. Service providers will be relieved to hear that 50G and 10G PONs can share the same fibres. And 100 Gbit/s PONs are not far over the horizon.

Meanwhile in the mobile camp, a BT trial of a 5G standalone (SA) system achieved download speeds of 1.85 Gbit/s. This was made possible by using carrier aggregation, a first for any European operator. In the BT trial, three FDD radio carriers were combined with two TDD carriers to increase capacity.

The provision of 5G SA with carrier aggregation will provide high data rates for mobiles in areas of high demand such as city centres.

PTT offers a window on the latest telecoms technologies with its catalogue of online courses. You can learn about 5G SA mobile networks and carrier aggregation in the PTT course 4G and 5G radio access networks. The PTT course Next generation access networks describes the capabilities and operation of the latest generations of passive optical network.