That van you see up there isn’t just any van. In fact, many years later when we’re all surfing the web on our transparent bendable phones with 5G speeds, we’ll look back on this day and thank the little guy.

The reason for that is this vehicle was used in an experiment by NTT DoCoMo and the Tokyo Institute of Technology that successfully in ” the world’s first packet transmission uplink rate of approximately 10 Gbps.”

What are you going to do with all that mobile upload speed you say?

Don’t worry, the carrier also announced that the technologies behind the experiment are also applicable to downlink speeds, which suggests a ridiculous 4G successor with 10Gbps is possible in the future. For comparison, NTT DoCoMo’s current LTE speeds top out at a maximum 100Mbps.

If you’re wondering exactly how the experiment was carried out (and why a van was involved), here is an explanation from NTT DoCoMo:

In the experiment, a 400 MHz bandwidth in the 11 GHz spectrum was transmitted from a mobile station moving at approximately 9 km/h. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology was used to spatially multiplex different data streams using 8 transmitting antennas and 16 receiving antennas on the same frequency.

While we won’t be seeing these kinds of speeds in our phones anytime soon, it’s nice to knowing that it’s coming — and somebody’s already working on making it happen.

And in case you missed it, Japan also has trucks that drive themselves.

[via NTT DoCoMo, Engadget]