In December 2018, Qualcomm's annual event took place: Snapdragon Tech Summit. The company announced the new Snapdragon 855 processor for mobile and the Snapdragon 8cx for PC, with the network being the main topic of discussion 5G. На мероприятии присутствовали представители крупнейших мобильных операторов на территории США: Verizon и AT&T, которые приняли участие в обсуждении сети нового поколения. The work was even shown 5G. Qualcomm and their channel partners have been working together to roll out 5G – networks for two years now, and finally the first fruits have begun to emerge.
In 2019, according to Qualcomm, the largest smartphone manufacturers Android will release the first flagships that will support the new network in Europe, America, China and Korea. While operators are already getting ready to use the new technology, their users are trying to understand how 5G will affect their lives. At Snapdragon Tech Summit, President of Qaulcomm – Cristiano Amon answered the audience's most exciting questions about 5G and talked about the new opportunities that will become available with the new technology. We will try to cover the most interesting moments of this interview.
- Power consumption and performance problem for smartphones with 5G
- How is the network 5G different from the 4G network?
- When will the full transition to next-generation networks take place?
- When will the first smartphones with support 5G appear in the budget segment?
- Will 5G – routers replace cable Internet?
Power consumption and performance problem for smartphones with 5G
As you probably remember, when the first 4G smartphones began to appear, they had a serious problem associated with increased power consumption when connected to a 4G network and loss of performance due to heat. This problem was due to the fact that smartphones and batteries of the time were simply not ready for the new technology. Modern devices have a huge supply of computing power and a reserve of battery, so serious problems should not arise.
Much of what you can do on a computer today, you can do on a smartphone: play, watch high-quality videos / movies, pay bills on the Internet. But big games and high quality video files require high internet speed. To achieve this without losing performance is possible only by overcoming all technical difficulties: materials, form factor, industrial design, thermal conditions and requirements for limiting power, which actually was what Qaulcomm developers did during the development of the new technology. For this, a millimeter-wave antenna module has been developed: Qualcomm QTMO52. In combination with the Snapdragon X50 modem, these problems have been solved, and possible power consumption problems will be solved by a new type of battery.
Qualcomm QTMO52 Antenna Module and Snapdragon X50 Modem 5G
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How is the network 5G different from the 4G network?
If the performance and battery life remain at the same level, and in general you continue to use the smartphone in the same mode as with 4G, then the user may ask the question: “Why would I then change my smartphone to a more expensive device with 5G? ”
The answer is simple: high speed and low latency. With 5G you can listen to music online, watch and quickly download videos in 4K. Imagine a 4K video download at the same speed as a single song. Thanks to the high speed, using the cloud will become much more pleasant, as a result, there will be no need for microSD cards. You can also instantly save and download high quality photos from the cloud. In general, whatever you do on the Internet, you can do it more comfortably.
With the release of 5G, mobile gaming will change dramatically. If earlier mobile gaming was not taken seriously and was not compared directly with PC and console gaming, now mobile gaming has successfully joined this “bunch”. Proof of this is the appearance on smartphones of popular PC and console games: PUBG, Fortnite, etc. Such serious games require high performance and a stable Internet with high speed.
According to the president of Qualcomm, they have not yet revealed all the possibilities 5G. But even the above possibilities are enough to make a choice in favor of 5G. Just imagine how people's perception of smartphones will change when the use of the cloud service ceases to seem like something unusual and inconvenient due to the low speed of the Internet. Many people don't know this, but even now some apps use cloud storage for their work, like WhatsApp and Instagram, they don't use your phone's camera app – they use the camera inside the app itself.
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When will the full transition to next-generation networks take place?
If by full transition we understand the transition to 5G not only mobile Internet, but home and private, then the entire infrastructure will be ready to use the new technology by 2020, the President of Qaulcomm said.
But when Qualcomm partners make a full transition to 5G – networks, it depends only on themselves, and Qualcomm cannot affect the speed of the transition, even if the technology works perfectly, and the transition takes a minimum of time and effort. .
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When will the first smartphones with support 5G appear in the budget segment?
Most likely in 2020, when the full transition of most of the infrastructure to 5G – networks will take place, and when 5G will become available to a large number of users.
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Will 5G – routers replace cable Internet?
Sooner or later, yes, but this will not happen very soon and not everywhere: after all, most of the IT infrastructure of the whole world is tied precisely to the cable Internet, and there are also regions whose residents do not have access to the Internet at all. First of all, such a transition is likely to occur in large metropolitan areas, since in the conditions of densely populated cities, laying a cable causes a lot of problems. In addition, with high speed and low latency 5G, new opportunities open up before you that are not available for cable Internet.
The suburbs have a different problem, because of the high frequencies, the signal 5G cannot be transmitted over long distances, so a large number of towers are required. As a result, the question arises about the financial component.
Be that as it may, 5G – networks are just starting their way, so it is difficult to predict in which direction this technology will develop in the future.
Verizon and inSeego NR Router 5G
Should you go shopping for one of these routers? Probably not, as 5G will take several years to cover 4G. But if you happen to find yourself in a place where good broadband is hard to find, 5G can fix your connection problem.