Well, they did invent the thing. Qualcomm is one of those companies whose products you use all the time without knowing it. Their chips are almost certainly in your phone right now, powering its ability to, well, be a phone. The company provides systems for cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth that make it easier for phone makers to put everything together in a nice little package. Without companies like Qualcomm and Broadcom (both, by the way, US-based firms) your phone would most certainly look different.
So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when they manage to create several videos that explain the next generation of wireless services, which they are calling “Gigabit LTE.” This is not to be confused with “5G”, which is definitely coming down the road. Gigabit LTE uses today’s cellular technology in new and innovative ways to boost your cell internet speeds by 20x or more. No phone supports it yet, and no carrier supports it yet, but if Qualcomm went to the trouble of explaining it, you had better bet it’s just around the corner.
Take a look at these videos showing the core technologies of Gigabit LTE and how they will help you stream at simply ridiculous speeds. (The text below is theirs, too.
Carrier aggregation adds more lanes to the network’s highway by combining multiple carriers — that is, multiple LTE connections—which provides more capacity and enables faster downloads for all users.
4×4 MIMO improves operator spectrum efficiency and boosts the data rate for Gigabit LTE devices. Whereas carrier aggregation widens the network highway, 4×4 MIMO adds up to two more layers of data lanes on top of the existing ones to carry more data on the same amount of spectrum.
The gold standard for data rates was 6 bits per signal but that data transfer volume recently pumped up to 8 bits, delivering 33 percent faster connection speeds for Gigabit LTE devices. Using our highway analogy, 256-QAM allows each truck to carry more data, which means fewer trucks are needed, which relieves congestion on the network highway.
Get off the congested network highway and take the side streets with LTE in Unlicensed Spectrum. LTE in Unlicensed boosts network capacity in high traffic areas like stadiums, shopping malls, airports, and more with Gigabit LTE speed for a high quality and robust user experience.
Qualcomm Technologies continues its trailblazing inventions in mobile connectivity, pioneering the world’s first annoucned Gigabit LTE cellular modem with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X16 LTE modem. Since then, a total of 10 Gigabit LTE-capable devices have been brought to users all over the world with this groundbreaking modem at their heart. We push the technological envelope, continually evolving Gigabit LTE network highways in order to better deliver wide-area coverage, high-speed data rates and low latency in support of countless use cases and upcoming releases.
