February 11th 2016

Qualcomm is a US company based in San Diego who specialise in designing ARM processors and mobile phone modems. This article covers a 4g Modem called the Snapdragon X16 which can support 4g LTE speeds of up to 1gbps. As this new technology is limited to only if the phone is close to the mast, we can see limited roll out to cities which have many situated on top of towers. One of the good things is that, mast operators simply need to update firmware on the masts to provide the new speed, while still supporting older LTE versions, so we can see quick rollouts happening as users replace their phones on average once every two years.

What’s great about this is that one day we could be using 4g as our main broadband because its cheaper than via fibre optics in the UK due to the installation costs. Having the Snapdragon x16 in 4G routers also means we can have around 1gbps in the home, which was unheard of a year ago!