mmWave Buildout Trend Gains Steam Globally Says Qualcomm

SHARE THIS ARTICLE

5G millimeter wave commercial wireless operations have just begun in Japan and Italy, along with the United States, Cristiano Amon, President and CEO, Qualcomm Inc., said during his keynote at last week’s Qualcomm 5G Summit, held in San Diego. Additionally, 10 more operators across those regions have begun pre-commercial efforts to launch mmWave.

In Japan, for example, all carriers, KDDI, Docomo, Rakuten Mobile and Softbank are involved. There are more than a dozen smartphones, including the Galaxy S22, that support the mmWave frequencies, plus hotspots.  

“The [Japanese] network is very robust with 20,000 gNodeB’s deployed with mmWave and all four operators are deploying this feature of 5G NR dual connectivity for coverage supporting network densification for high capacity hotspots,” Amon said. “So, it’s really exciting to see Japan now getting mmWave deployment on a large scale and I think that trend will continue.”

Critical to the infrastructure buildout, the ecosystem supporting mmWave capabilities now includes 150+ devices, from phones to personal computers, across 50 vendors, including the recently announced commercial PC, Lenovo ThinkPad X13, powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 compute platform.

Amon noted that 5G mmWave is evolving in ways that will make it more commercial. For example, 5G mmWave standalone allows an operator to consider deploying mmWave wave for fixed wireless as a separate network and may bring a different vendor. Additionally, integrated access and backhaul makes it easy to deploy, especially in situations where there is no access to fiber, Amon said.

There is more good news in the area of available spectrum. Frequencies up to 71 GHz, including 60 GHz unlicensed band, are now available, which can open doors to new use cases and deployments, according to Amon.

The only knock on mmWave spectrum is the lack of range. To address that, Qualcomm designed its modem with artificial intelligence, which provides a 20 percent range extension in the mmWave bands. The modem also provides a 73 percent increase in throughput of sub-6 GHz mobility at the edge of the cell. “I think we’re seeing the beginning of significant enhancements of the 5G roadmap using AI,” Amon said.

By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.