Just five years after the first 4G smartphone hit the market, the wireless industry is already preparing for 5G.

Each of the four nationwide cell phone carriers, as well as smartphone chipmakers and the major network equipment companies are working on developing 5G network technology for their customers.

There are many significant hurdles that all the industry players have to clear before you’ll see a little 5G symbol next to the signal bars on your smartphone screen. For example, it has yet to be determined what 5G even means, let alone what it will look like and when it will get here.

But as consumers use up rapidly growing amounts of 4G bandwidth watching streaming videos on their phones, 5G will soon become a necessity. As telecom engineers work furiously to develop 5G technology, we’re getting a clearer picture of the who, what, where, when and why of 5G.

What is 5G?

The “G” in 3G, 4G and 5G stands for “generation.” So 5G will be the fifth generation of wireless network technology.

The standards for 5G have not yet been set. According to Bill Smith, president of AT&T’s (T, Tech30)network operations, 5G will likely be defined in 2018, and the standards for 5G will codified sometime in 2019 by the standards-setting International Telecommunication Union, a branch of the United Nations. The standards will determine which wireless technologies can be called “5G,” as well as what its characteristics must include, such as how fast it will be.

Still, it’s possible to make a very educated guess about what 5G will look like based on the emerging 5G technologies that the wireless industry is experimenting with.

Here’s the elevator pitch: 5G will be faster, smarter and less power-hungry than 4G, enabling a slew of new wireless gadgets. 5G will let us have faster smartphones, more smart-home devices and longer-lasting wearable gizmos.

How fast will 5G be?

5G has the potential to offer speeds up to 40 times faster than 4G — fast enough to stream “8K” video in 3-D or download a 3-D movie in about 6 seconds (on 4G, it would take 6 minutes).

Unfortunately for consumers, there’s a difference between lab experiments and reality. Peak speeds are fun to dream about, but in the real world, actual speeds are much slower than promised.

Nokia (NOK), one of the biggest 5G players, believes that its 5G technology will allow for real-world speeds of about 100 Megabits per second when the network is most congested — that’s about four times faster than 4G’s top speed.

Another characteristic of 5G is that it will have ultra-low latency, meaning that it could drastically reduce the amount of time it takes for the network to respond to your commands. That could give the appearance of much faster loading websites, apps, videos and messages.

How will it work?

A lot of the wireless companies’ 5G experimentation is taking place in super-high frequencies — as high as 73,000 MHz. Today’s cell phone networks broadcast signal in a range of 700 MHz to 3,500 MHz.

The advantage of high-frequency signals is that they’re capable of providing significantly faster data speeds. The disadvantage is that they travel much shorter distances and they can’t easily penetrate walls. That means thousands — perhaps even millions — of mini cell towers, or “small cells” would need to be placed on top of every lamp post, every building, inside every home and potentially every room.

That presents a host of problems. How can cell phone companies possibly process all that data? There are companies, such as Google’s recently acquired Alpental, that are working on those “backhaul” issues. But they’re not so close to a solution, according to Akshay Sharma, wireless infrastructure analyst at Gartner.

That’s why 5G might complement 4G, rather than outright replace it. In buildings and in crowded areas, 5G might provide a speed boost. But when you’re driving down the highway, 4G could be your only option — at least for a while.

When is 5G coming?

None of these questions are going to be answered any time soon. The industry’s consensus is that it will run 5G experiments in South Korea during the 2018 Winter Olympics, with mass deployments beginning sometime in 2020.

Yet Verizon (VZ, Tech30) has said that it is working on 5G technology with the aim of bringing it to market much sooner — as early as 2017.

With all the questions surrounding 5G and all the wrinkles that need to be ironed out, it’s exceedingly unlikely that anything Verizon does will be widely deployed. For example, the smartphone makers will need to develop chips that are capable of sending and receiving 5G signal without driving costs significantly higher.

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Takeaway: It’s official. Verizon is getting the iPhone. There are five big questions that we’ve been hearing in relation to the iPhone 4 launch on Verizon. Here are the answers.

It’s official. AT&T’s deal as the exclusive US carrier for the iPhone has ended (apparently the 4-year deal concluded at the end of 2010), and Verizon is the first new US telecom to add the iPhone to its roster. The long-anticipated move was announced at a Verizon press event at New York’s Lincoln Center on Tuesday in the midst of a circus atmosphere that included the tech press, all of the national news networks, and even The Daily Show.

The iPhone 4 will arrive on Verizon on February 10. Current Verizon customers will be able to pre-order online starting February 3. The price of the iPhone will remain the same: $199 for 16GB and $299 for 32GB, with a two-year Verizon contract. As for the price of Verizon data plans for the iPhone, Verizon coyly stated, “Customers will also be required to activate a data package. Pricing will be announced at a later date.”

It’s odd that the iPhone wouldn’t simply use the existing Verizon 3G data plans. This seems to indicate a couple possible scenarios. Either: 1.) Verizon is going to have a special data plan just for the iPhone (it has been rumored that Verizon would offer a truly unlimited data plan for iPhone), or 2.) Verizon is about to change the price of all of its 3G data plans in conjunction with the iPhone launch.

Beyond the basic details, here are answers to five big questions that we’ve been hearing from our audience in relation to the iPhone finally landing on Verizon:

1. Will it be CDMA or LTE?
Unfortunately, the iPhone 4 will only run on Verizon’s 3G CDMA network and not on its newly-launched 4G LTE network. This was the biggest disappointment of the Verizon iPhone announcement, especially since upcoming Android devices like the HTC Thunderbolt and Motorola Droid Bionic will be running on the LTE superhighway in a few months. At CES last week I tested the HTC Thunderbolt on the Verizon LTE network and was blown away by the desktop-like speeds for loading Web pages. At today’s press event Apple said that including LTE in the iPhone 4 would have involved “design compromises” (probably in size and battery life) and would have taken longer before it was ready to launch. However, both Apple and Verizon stated that this is just the beginning of their partnership (Translation: Expect an LTE-capable iPhone in the future).

2. Will it have mobile hotspot capability?
The biggest surprise of the Verizon iPhone announcement — and arguably the biggest news of the press conference since everything else was pretty much as expected — was that the Verizon version of the iPhone will offer the capability of turning itself into a mobile hotspot that can share its 3G Internet connection over Wi-Fi with up to five devices. Again, no information was provided on whether Verizon will charge extra for mobile hotspot capability. Verizon has wide variations in its treatment of tethering and mobile hotspot charges. It has charged Android users an additional fee for it, but threw it in for free to Palm Pre Plus users. What they do with the iPhone will probably depend on how aggressively the company wants to try to poach current AT&T iPhone customers.

3. Does new Verizon model fix iPhone 4’s antenna?
As you’ve probably heard, when the iPhone 4 first launched last June there were a bunch of customers who experienced antenna problems when holding the iPhone in a way that covered a sensitive portion of the antenna in the lower left-hand corner of the phone. The problem was drastically overblown by the tech press and drastically understated by Apple. In the end, Apple said the problem was significantly reduced if you use an iPhone case and offered free cases to buyers. A number of people have asked if Apple has fixed the problem in this new iteration of the iPhone 4 for Verizon. Naturally, Apple hasn’t said that it has changed anything with the iPhone antenna, but a closer look at the Verizon iPhone shows that it does indeed have a different antenna design and early reports indicate that the Verizon iPhone is not exhibiting the antenna problems.

4. Can you transfer an existing iPhone to Verizon?
The AT&T version of both the iPhone 3GS (which just got a price drop to $50) and iPhone 4 are built on what’s called GSM radio technology (used by both AT&T and T-Mobile in the US). Meanwhile, Verizon and Sprint use a completely different technology called CDMA. The two standards are incompatible. They use different radios and operate on different wireless frequencies. So, no, you cannot take your existing AT&T iPhone and walk into a Verizon store and simply switch networks. Even if you own an iPhone 4 you will have to purchase a completely new iPhone 4 with CDMA chips in order for it to work on Verizon.

5. Will iPhone kill Verizon’s network like it did to AT&T?
Another question that we heard a lot leading up to the expected announcement of the Verizon iPhone today was whether the influx of millions of new iPhone users would bring the Verizon network to its knees the same way it has crushed the AT&T network in areas such as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles and at big events like CES and SXSW. I think the answer is “no,” for several reasons. First of all, Verizon is a lot more serious than any of the other US wireless carriers when it comes to network integrity. They aggressively test and audit their own network, so I’ll think they’ll be ready. Second, they just beefed up all of their cell sites to handle additional bandwidth and network load for the launch of their 4G LTE network in 38 cities and they are in the process of upgrading the rest of the US to LTE over the next 24-36 months. Third, while there will be plenty of existing Verizon customers who jump on board with the iPhone and some die-hards who jump from AT&T to Verizon, the vast majority of iPhone customers will remain on AT&T because they are under contract and leaving would be prohibitively expensive.

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