Qualcomm Snapdragon X50 5G modem officially announced

Qualcomm has unveiled the new Snapdragon X50 5G modem, becoming the first to unveil a commercial model designed for the next generation of smartphones. With the unveiling, Qualcomm wants to allow phone manufacturers and operators to start testing its modems on 5G networks.

The Snapdragon X50 supports 5G operations in the 28GHz band, which happens to be the band used by Nokia and U.S. Cellular in their recent 5G tests.

The modem will handle peak downlink speeds of 5Gbps, which was achieved in the same testing discussed above. To support these speeds, the modem uses "Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna technology with adaptive beamforming and beam tracking techniques." This helps the modem do its thing even in situations where the cell tower is not in the line-of-sight.

The modem can be combined with a Snapdragon chipset with an integrated Gigabit LTE modem. The Snapdragon X50 5G modem will work with multi-mode 4G/5G mobile broadband, as well as fixed wireless broadband devices.

The Snapdragon X50 5G modem will be available for sampling during the second half of next year. Commercial products employing the chip will be offered to consumers during the first half of 2019.


source - Qualcomm | PhoneArena