WAILEA, Hawaii—How fast is 5G? Well, on Motorola's Z3 phone and Verizon's network here at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit, we saw a gigabyte file download in 17 seconds—about 470 megabits per second.

That falls short of the multi-gigabit promises we've been hearing from 5G, but it's important to understand the context here. Verizon set up a test network that was running multiple demos in the same room: a low-latency telemedicine demo with Inseego, a video-streaming demo with Samsung, and the download demos with the Z3. In other words, that was a crowded network, just like we're going to end up having in the real world. And in the real world, where you regularly get 20-40Mbps on LTE, 470Mbps on 5G is pretty solid.

Motorola's demo was the next step after the company announced its 5G Moto Mod in August. The mod is a backpack, which looks a lot like a battery pack, and attaches to its midrange Moto Z3 phone to add 5G capability on Verizon's network.

At the time, it looked like a quick-and-easy way for Verizon to claim the mantle of "first 5G phone" when no other actual 5G phones had yet been announced. With Samsung showing off its 5G phone here at the Snapdragon Summit, the Z3 may still have a place as the first midrange 5G phone. The phone itself costs only $480, so if the mod isn't extremely expensive, the combination will come well under what's sure to be premium prices for the Samsung and LG phones announced so far.

The speedy, but not gigabit, download shows the importance of talking not about peak speeds, but about average speeds and floors. People with 4G phones typically feel the pain not when their phones drop to 20Mbps, but when their phones drop to 5Mbps; the floor on today's 4G networks tends to be grindingly low.

If 5G can handle a crowd and maintain the 10x performance advantage we saw in this demo, it'll finally feel like a true mobile broadband experience—something the carriers have been promising for a decade now. We'll have to see how Verizon's network performs in the wild when it launches in early 2019, but for now, the signs are encouraging.