Qualcomm's new chips small enough to make 5G smartphones a reality by 2019

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On Monday, Qualcomm unveiled it new QTM052 millimeter wave and QPM56xx sub 6GHz radio frequency antenna modules that it says will bring super fast 5G speeds to smartphones by the first half of 2019. Qualcomm says that with this technology realistic speeds of up 1.4 Gbps can be expected which is much faster than the peak 4G speeds of 70 Mbps.

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If the technical jargon is overwhelming you, then here is a really nice video that explains the various aspects of 5G technologies:

As you have learnt in the video, the problem with millimeter waves is that they are very susceptible to blockages and absorption by obstacles. MIMO and Beam Forming technologies helped to take care of that problem from the cellular antenna point of view to a large extent. However, there still remained a problem that the user's hand on the phone would be enough to block its signal path. In addition, the modems initially developed by Qualcomm were so large that they had to be lugged around in a cart as can be seen in their video from early 2017:

The newly developed chips however are so small that three of them can be easily fitted inside smartphones of current dimensions, although the X50 modem can handle four such chips. This means that spreading them out across the phones would ensure that at least one chip would have proper connectivity.

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With the dawn of the era of big data and streaming of high resolution visual content becoming the norm, the need for more and more data at faster rates is only going to become increasingly insatiable. Smartphone makers as well as the telecom giants all want to be the first to tap this high potential market. Qualcomm's breakthrough could revolutionize these two industry sectors to say the least.

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