IEEE Future Directions
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Marketing is hard at work to send the message that you can’t live without 1Gbps mobile connectivity, that is why 5G is really needed.
As you are wondering if that is really the case Qualcomm has announced the availability of the Snapdragon X24 chip that can sustain 2Gbps on LTE (4G), in line with Cat. 20 LTE.
The chip is intended to be inserted in modems, not in smartphones and Qualcomm is “selling” it as a step towards 5G. Notice that this chip will operate at the edges of the network, not in the core. The core is not ready yet to deliver this kind of bandwidth, there are plans to deploy more capacity and leverage on LTE advances with a roadmap that extends to 2023.
I find interesting this growth/evolution happening at the edges. It reminds me of the discussion that raged at the end of the last century (that is 20 years ago) with players in the computer area mocked the ones in telecommunications area because of the speed of evolution of computers vs the one of telecommunications. Actually it was just a difference in the observation point: computer players where looking at micro evolution, telecom players at macro evolution. The difference was between that “micro” and “macro” not in the evolution speed that was actually the same.
In the computer world you tend to look at the new model that just ame out. And of course that model came out just a few weeks after another model came out. This gives the impression of a continuous and amazingly fast speed of evolution: something new every few weeks!
On the other hand, in telecommunications you perceive something new when the whole infrastructure evolves and that takes years, 10 years, approximately, from a G to the next G+1! How long time does it takes before a generation of computers is replaced by a new one? Several years! It is just when you look at a single model on a store shelf that you perceive this rapid evolution. Look at the computer you use back home and the evolution time shifts from a few weeks to several years!
Telecommunications are based on complex infrastructures, deployed at a cost of billions $ and infrastructures owners are more interested in recapping their investment than in sinking it by deploying (and investing) new stuff. Which, by the way happens every single day! Every single day a telecom operator is deploying something new and you can see new equipment flowing in on a weekly base. But the impact is felt over a period of years by the end users.
What is interesting is that this situation is going to change: it has already started to change with the cellphones, where we perceive a continuous and fast evolution, with a life time below 2 years (in some Countries and user segment it is around or below a year).
With 5G and even more with 6G we are going to perceive the impact of evolution at the micro scale also for infrastructures. Smartphones and devices embedding communications capabilities will also become network nodes with the capability to set up local networks, dynamically rearranging the network topology on a local scale and the big networks will dynamically take advantage of the edge evolution through self configuration and planning.
This is why products like Snapdragon X24 are so important. They are aiming at the network edges but the overall evolution of network infrastructure architectures will leverage on these advances resulting in an overall end-to-end evolution.
The future is coming, and it will no longer look as it used to be.
