LAS VEGAS – 5G won’t just be an incremental improvement over 4G but will have a profound impact on everything from appliances and autonomous vehicles to drones, health care, and wearables. This according to Qualcomm’s CEO Steve Mollenkopf at his CES keynote where he focused on how his chip company will be at forefront of the transition to 5G.
During his presentation Mollenkopf quoted from an economic study commissioned by Qualcomm that forecasts that the 5G value chain will generate up to $3.5 trillion in revenue by 2035 and support up to 22 million jobs added Mollenkopf.
Mollenkopf boasted that 5G streaming will be so fast that "you'll never need a USB cable again.” He noted that Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 835 processor is built for “gigabit class” LTE and can bring “fibre-like experience to a wireless connection.” The chip is currently in production and commercial devices utilizing it will be make it to market in the first half of 2017.
Smartphone makers most likely will pair the Snapdragon 835 with the X50, Qualcomm’s 5G modem that was announced last October. The X50 supports 28 GHz millimeter wave bandspectrum that has been associated with 5G, and both Verizon Wireless and AT&T began testing of it last year.
Mollenkopf says the 835 processor will also support augmented and virtual reality and support streaming 360-degree 4K video at 60 fps over a gigabit-class LTE connection.
To highlight the role 5G could have in the deployment of mission-critical services Mollenkopf invited his team on stage to run a live demo of Snapdragon Flight. For the first time Qualcomm showed flight control and machine learning running together on a number of drones so they could avoid obstacles.
Now the world’s wireless networks just have to get themselves ready for it, with more upgrades.
