Qualcomm unveils X50 modem: supersonic speeds up to 5Gbps

The new modems will be able to reach speeds of 5 Gigabits per second in downloads. The Qualcomm X50 will be available between 2018 and 2020

Forever, downloading a movie will take just a few seconds. And that's thanks to the 5G modems that Qualcomm announced at the Hong Kong summit. An evolution of the LTE network that will allow us to surf at a speed never seen before. In China, the American company has also presented new chips that will be integrated into smartphones that will be released in the coming months.

According to what Qualcomm said, the X50 modem will be able to reach 5 Gbps in download, a frightening speed considering the one currently offered by the LTE network. The 4G in fact allows to reach a maximum speed of 450 Mbps at least in theory, because in practice connections occur at a much lower speed that slightly exceeds 40 Megabits per second. The new technology will initially use the millimeter waves of the 28 GHz band and will be available no earlier than 2018. In order to achieve this high connection speed, the X50 modem will resort, only for downloading, to a bandwidth of 800 MHz.

Not before 2018

(Taken from YouTube)

The use of such high frequencies has range and penetration limits, however. To solve this problem Qualcomm will use the MIMO antenna that with its technology will allow the signal to bypass the hostels. As already mentioned, before being able to take full advantage of the speed offered by the new processor X50 will have to spend years, first because it will need a network coverage quite extensive. And Qualcomm knows it, so much so that the X50 processor if it will have integrated an LTE modem Snapdragon will be able to switch from 5G to the slower 4G connection. In the meantime, in the coming months, smartphones could receive the Snapdragon X16 LTE processor, capable of reaching a speed of 1 Gibabit per second in download.

At the 4G/5G summit, Qualcomm also announced other processors. In fact, the American company introduced three new SoCs for mid- to low-end smartphones. We are talking about the Snapdragon 653, 626 and 427 that allow an increase in performance of the devices on which they are installed by 10% and decrease thanks to Quickcharge 3.0 charging times.

(The video in the opening Snapdragon X50 is taken from YouTube)

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