back to article 1Gbps quad-antenna mobile broadband chip dives off Qualcomm's drawing board

California chip designer Qualcomm says it has crafted an LTE modem capable of downloading data at 0.98Gbps, tops. Samples of the new Snapdragon X16 are in the hands of gadget makers, and should appear in products shipping in the second half of the year, we're told. The chip will be fabricated using a 14nm FinFET process. The …

  1. Big Ed

    Call Me A Crumugeon

    Brilliant technical achievement, but who cares? I'm still waiting for my investments in quadraphonic music, laser disk, and bubble memory to pay off.

    Why does anyone need 1Gb/s when the Cellcos charge a shed load of bucks for 20GB a month for devices that hold 16 to 64GB. I don't really care that a song in MBs takes a few seconds vs. instant download.

    Maybe the technology drives down the cost per byte for Cellcos; but until they offer unlimited data and tethering, without throttling, this technology can join the bubble memory heap.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Call Me A Crumugeon

      Nevermind that, no one needs anything close to that data rate even if they have unlimited data. What can you do with all that bandwidth unless your phone is a hotspot for your whole office? You can only watch one video at a time on your phone, and even 4K video from Netflix requires about 1/60th that rate. Even if you could stream full 4K Blu Ray quality that's only a tenth of that rate.

      At that speed you would fill up a 128 GB phone in under 20 minutes.

      1. Charles 9

        Re: Call Me A Crumugeon

        The article notes that one possible use right now would be to create a remote WiFi hotspot (under commercial agreements, I would imagine), in which case you may have 30 or 40 people streaming 4K Netflix at once.

        1. Message From A Self-Destructing Turnip

          Re: Call Me A Crumugeon

          "640 kB ought to be enough memory for anybody" - A. Crumugeon

          Streaming constantly at 1Gb/s is not really the point. As mentioned above your 100MB download will be quicker, this frees up the channel for another user. The end result is that the telecom provider gets more network bandwidth at little extra cost, which should result in better value data tariffs. But of course nobody would want that.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Call Me A Crumugeon

      "Why does anyone need 1Gb/s when the Cellcos charge a shed load of bucks for 20GB a month "

      Not everywhere in the world is the UK or the US.

    3. Vector

      Re: Call Me A Crumugeon

      "Why does anyone need 1Gb/s..."

      You might not need it today. You might not even need it tomorrow. I suspect, however, that we'll all find a use for it in the not to distant future.

      Being an old curmudgeon myself, I remember when 10Mb was blazing fast for a wired line! You get that speed today, you're moderately satisfied with your service (and possibly grumping about how it will barely suffice).

      Besides, are the telcos and modem manufacturers supposed to just sit back because we have enough bandwidth today?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Call Me A Crumugeon

        As I've posted before many times, show me the potential use case. Even for technology that doesn't exist today (providing you don't go crazy and talk technology that may never exist like Star Trek holodecks)

        The reason why we kept needing faster and faster broadband speeds is because our media became more complex and used more bandwidth. We went from text only, to pictures, to audio files, to video to HD and soon 4K video. That's the more complex and information rich media we can provide to our senses. Why are we going to want faster and faster connections when we've reached the pinnacle for maximum information density we can input to our senses?

        Even if we do some sort of a 3D VR like Oculus/Hololens type of thing that's still basically streaming a couple 4K images at us at a slightly higher frame rate (and most likely you won't stream live images to it but rather have it build the images itself like a video game does, you'd only be streaming it if this became a popular way to get a skier's eye view of slalom races or something)

        We've maxed out the bandwidth our senses can really use, so there are no more order of magnitude increases in our needs. A single person or family won't be able to usefully consume even a gigabit, and there's certainly no market for ever going higher. Yeah, if it helps make better collective use of resources its useful to upgrade in that sense, but no one is going to say "man my 300 Mbps connection is holding me back, I wish gigabit were available where I live!"

        1. Charles 9

          Re: Call Me A Crumugeon

          "We've maxed out the bandwidth our senses can really use, so there are no more order of magnitude increases in our needs."

          I don't think we have. Remember, our eyes are designed to detect changes in images and can do it as quickly as 1/200th of a second according to US Naval research. That's why most people can easily distinguish between a 30fps presentation and a 60fps one. What's to stop going up to 120fps and using 8K imagery that's projected using high-density VR displays put right in front of our eyes (meaning close enough to still see the pixels)?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Call Me A Crumugeon

            That's why I said "no more order of magnitude increases in our needs". Yes, maybe we can step up the frame rate and resolution a bit more, but it isn't like quadrupling the resolution and frame rate requires 16x more bandwidth for compressed images. More like 2-3x since you still have plenty of areas of similar color where resolution doesn't matter and most of the frames are similar to the previous frames - moreso the faster your frame rate.

            Anyway, like I said it is unlikely we'd be remotely streaming live video or fully rendered VR. More likely it would be done locally, just like most video gaming is rendered locally rather than streamed today.

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