Qualcomm just announced its first portable 5G modem. That’s amazing, because there’s no official 5G radio standard yet. But with Verizon and Korea Telecom plugging ahead on “5G” rollouts for 2017, Qualcomm decided it needed to jump on the bandwagon with the new X50.
“It’s going to support these early 5G deployments, operating in the 28GHz millimeter wave spectrum, a brand new type of spectrum that has never been used for cellular before. It will have download speeds up to 5 gigabits per second,” said Sherif Hanna, technical marketing manager at Qualcomm.
The X50 will be designed primarily for handheld and mobile devices, although it could also be used for home broadband.
Hanna admits that calling this “5G” is carrier-marketing-driven. The official global 5G standard, called 5G NR, probably won’t be set until 2018. That hasn’t stopped Verizon or KT from rolling ahead, and it didn’t stop Ericsson from announcing that it had the “world’s first 5G radio,” the AIR 6468, at the end of August.
Gigabit LTE needs to supplement 5G because 5G technologies, initially, will have poor coverage and short range. Carriers that want to provide a consistent mobile experience would much rather have their multi-gigabit 5G step down to a gigabit rather than to 50 megabits or so.
Only 16 percent of mobile-phone operators can support gigabit LTE on their licensed spectrum, but that jumps to 64 percent if you include LTE-U and LAA technologies, Hanna said.
It’ll be a while before you see Qualcomm’s modem in any 5G phablets, though. The X50 is destined for devices in the first half of 2018, Hanna said.
