Ultra-fast 5G wireless will be 300% faster than Google Fiber - and it could be here by 2017

Cisco, Ericsson, and Intel are working on a new router to bring super speedy 5G wireless networking to homes and businesses.

The tech giants made the announcement at the Mobile World Congress taking place this week in Barcelona.

All of these tech companies are part of the Verizon 5G Technology Forum, a group that's trying to birth 5G into existence by 2017, not just in tests, but by making it available to actual commercial customers.

Ericsson, a company that makes network equipment for wireless service providers, has actually been working on 5G for years. Back in 2014, Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg said that 5G would take five years or longer to roll out, but Verizon is determined to push up that timeline.

5G promises to be remarkably fast. Early prototypes of 5G phones being demoed at MWC are operating at a mind-boggling 3.77 gigabits a second, That's over 300% faster than Google Fiber's 1G networks, and a magnitude faster than today's top-speed LTE (aka 4G) connection, which hit download speeds of 5 and 12 Mb ps.

Cisco and Ericsson aren't alone in the race to launch 5G. In October, Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo, using network equipment from its arch-rival Huawei, also demonstrated speeds of 3.6 Gb ps in the world's first large-scale public network test of 5G in China, reported the IBTimes' Mary-Ann Russon.

The idea isn't simply to make your smartphone download HD movies in a flash. All that speed means the network can handle more internet connections without slowing to a crawl.

And your home and business will soon have countless more gadgets on the network, as the age of the internet of things (IoT) is ushered in. That's when all kinds of inanimate objects get sensors, an internet connection, and can be controlled by apps. This includes everything from your appliances to your car to even your toothbrush.

This router announcement was one of several Cisco made at MWC on Monday with its former rival-turned-partner Ericsson. Both companies sell network equipment to telecom service providers and enterprises. For years there was talk of some sort of merger between the two.

Instead, Cisco's new CEO Chuck Robbins fired up a partnership with Ericsson in November where they would jointly create new products which they projected would generate an additional $1 billion in revenue apiece for the companies by 2018.

They have already landed their first joint customer, too, a cable company in the Dominican Republic, Ericsson announced on Monday.

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