(credit: Qualcomm)
Qualcomm's lead in the mobile SoC and modem market is no longer as unassailable as it once was, but the company continues to be out in front when it comes to pushing new LTE technologies. Case in point: its new Snapdragon X16 modem, which together with the WTR5975 transceiver boasts Category 16 LTE download speeds of up to 1Gbps. Most of today's phones top out at 300Mbps or 450Mbps, and the upcoming Snapdragon 820 will only go up to 600Mbps. The X16 will also support upload speeds of up to 150Mbps, which is equal to or only slightly higher than upload rates supported by current LTE modems.
Most recent LTE speed increases have come via carrier aggregation, which essentially combines multiple chunks of spectrum across multiple antennas to improve bandwidth. Most of today's high-end phones use two or three chunks of 20MHz spectrum to achieve download speeds of up to 300 or 450Mbps, respectively. The Snapdragon X12 achieves its 600Mbps speeds by using three chunks of 20MHz spectrum plus a higher 256-QAM rather than 64-QAM, increasing the amount of data that can be transmitted over the same link from 75Mbps to 100Mbps (albeit at the cost of higher interference). The X16 uses a combination of technologies to hit its 1Gbps theoretical peak. From the press release:
The Snapdragon X16 LTE modem is designed to reach Gigabit Class LTE speeds using the same amount of spectrum as Category 9 LTE devices. By using carrier aggregation and 4x4 MIMO, the Snapdragon X16 LTE modem can receive 10 unique streams of data using only three 20 MHz carriers. Its support for 256-QAM boosts the peak throughput of each stream from ~75 Mbps to ~100 Mbps, with additional gains possible with modem data compression.
To increase the number of 20MHz chunks of spectrum available for use, the modem can also use licensed and unlicensed LTE spectrum simultaneously.
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