Mike Snider

USA TODAY

President Obama is lending his support to the development of faster, more robust 5G wireless networks.

The president on Friday announced a $400 million Advanced Wireless Research Initiative to boost research for next-generation mobile networks. As part of the research, four city-sized testing grounds for 5G wireless services will be established, beginning in fiscal year 2017, which starts Oct. 1.

The move comes one day after the Federal Communications Commission voted to open more spectrum for 5G development and use. These 5G services would provide improved speeds of up to 100 times faster than delivered by today's 4G wireless networks.

Funding for the initiative will come from the National Science Foundation and $35 million in investment from companies such as AT&T, Intel, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon (for complete list go to the White House website).

5G wireless? FCC is about to give it a big push

Expected breakthroughs listed in the administration's plan include mobile phones and tablets that can download a movie in less than five seconds, improved self-driving vehicles, virtual reality job training simulators, live high-res video transmissions from first-responders to emergency rooms, and Gigabit-speed wireless broadband available in public places and businesses.

Already, there are more than 370 million Net-connected smart phones and other devices, with global growth expected to 200 billion in less than five years, said NSF director France A Córdova in a video message to attendees at an advanced wireless research gathering Friday.

That growth rate, driven by the advance of the Internet of Things and its connectedness of appliances and gadgets to the Net, will result in an average of 25 connected devices per person, she said. "We are witnessing our household appliances, cars and physical infrastructure becoming increasingly connected to the Internet," said Córdova, who noted that it was the NSFNet, created three decades ago, that developed into today's commercial Internet.

"All of us rely on the Internet daily," she said. "In order to meet the skyrocketing demand with ultra-fast speeds and high degrees of reliability, responsiveness and robustness, we will need a new generation of wireless communication infrastructure."

With major tests set to begin next year -- and deployment and new devices expected in 2020 -- 5G wireless can "provide a whole new level of mobile broadband connectivity, supporting use cases never before deemed possible for wireless," said Dean Brenner, senior vice president for government affairs at Qualcomm, in a statement issued in support of the FCC's 5G vote. Qualcomm is another tech company supporting the president's initiative.

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