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There’s No Standard for 5G Mobile Yet, But Qualcomm Has a Modem

Tuesday, Oct 18th, 2016 (9:29 am) - Score 590

We don’t yet have a solid standard for the future 5G based Mobile Broadband tech and nor do we know precisely what radio spectrum it will use, but that hasn’t stopped Qualcomm Technologies from launching one of the first ever 5G modems (Snapdragon X50). Speeds of up to 5Gbps are promised.

Apparently the “unprecedented” download speeds will be delivered by utilizing the 28GHz millimeter Wave (mmWave) radio spectrum band, as well as other advancements in signal processing.

In fairness 28GHz is a good choice because it’s popular with a number of the teams that are attempting to build a 5G solution, such as Samsung (here) and not to mention the recent pre-commercial field trial between Nokia and Verizon (here).

However 5G is also being designed to work at even higher (e.g. 73GHz) and plenty of lower frequencies (in the language of 5G, “lower” usually means bands above 6GHz). Ofcom has already identified several bands in different parts of the 6 – 100GHz range that could be candidates for the United Kingdom (here), but they’re also looking at 3.4-3.8GHz “as a potential first 5G band” (here).

One problem with these high frequency bands is that they’re normally pretty useless at penetrating through solid or even semi-solid objects. Outdoor coverage can suffer in the low powered mobile environment, unless you adopt a much denser and also potentially more expensive network architecture via small cells (caveat: this may only work at its best in big urban areas).

However Qualcomm suggest that their new Snapdragon X50 chip can overcome some of this, before falling back to 4G when a 5G cell cannot be reached (it’s likely to do that a lot since there are no 5G cells in the wild yet).

Qualcomm Statement

Given the challenges posed by the propagation characteristics of mmWave spectrum, many had speculated that mmWave would be confined to fixed wireless applications. But the X50 modem bears the Snapdragon name and is made by Qualcomm Technologies, so naturally, it’s built from the ground up for mobility.

Years of research and development have allowed us to invent technologies to overcome mmWave’s limitations. Instead of using only a handful of antennas (as with 4G), the Snapdragon X50 5G modem relies on multi-element antenna arrays. The antennas are designed to work together intelligently, using beamforming and beam tracking technologies, extending mmWave’s mobility and reach to non-line-of-sight scenarios. For example, the Snapdragon X50 5G modem can direct the energy of the mmWave beam, bouncing off obstacles to reach the mmWave 5G small cell with which it is communicating.

We should start to see the makings of a solid 5G standard emerge next year, with some degree of agreement likely to be reached during 2018. But most national regulators won’t be ready with the spectrum that 5G needs until around 2020, which means that full-scale commercial roll-outs may have to wait awhile.

On the other hand some operators, such as Nokia and Verizon in the USA, are aiming to begin a limited deployment as soon as early 2017. Mind you it’s fairly normal for Mobile Network Operators (MNO) to be ahead of the world’s various regulatory processes, but most countries will still have to wait a fairly long time.

Meanwhile Qualcomm claims that their Snapdragon X50 5G modem is expected to begin sampling in the second half of 2017, and the first products integrating it should then surface throughout 2018. But we strongly suspect that early 5G chips will be a real battery life killer, as is usually the case with new hardware.

Otherwise today’s announcement has perhaps overshadowed a similarly interesting one from the same company. Qualcomm also announced the “world’s first” commercial Gigabit Class LTE (4G) device (Snapdragon X16 LTE modem) and network. Anybody with a long enough memory may recall that the ability to hit 1Gbps in a mobile environment was considered a key requirement for 4G technology, although it’s taken awhile to deliver on that.

One of the first devices to use the new X16 chip is the NETGEAR Mobile Router MR1100, which takes advantage of several LTE-Advanced technologies (including 3x carrier aggregation, 4×4 MIMO and 256-QAM) to boost download speeds up to a peak of 979Mbps. Naturally the real-world environment of limited local network capacity, spectrum and shared bandwidth means that you’re unlikely to get even close to that under normal conditions.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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