Your Tech Story

5g

Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 and 6 Series

The Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 and 6 Series will be the Low-Budget 5G Chipsets

4G has made life a lot faster, and now, 5G is the next big thing the people are looking forward to. Till now, only a few companies have been able to get their hands on this technology, including Oppo Reno, Samsung Galaxy S, One Plus 7, etc., Qualcomm being the biggest chipmaker to provide them with the 5G modem.

Till now, Qualcomm had been offering the handsets makers with the separate 5G modem. But recently the company had announced that it will be including the 5G technology in its upcoming 8xx series 5G platform. That means, no separate modems but the 5G technology integrated to the processor itself. Adding to that, now the company has announced that the mid-range Snapdragon 6xx and 7xx chipsets will also have the 5G technology included into them.

The company announced its new Snapdragon 7xx and 6xx series 5G processors at the ongoing IFA event in Berlin, Germany. The announcement also revealed that there will be an extended range of 5G technology that will offer the support for technologies like the sub-6Ghz and mmWave spectrums, TDD and FDD modes, 5G multi-SIM, and Standalone (SA) and non-standalone (NSA) network architectures, etc.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 and 6 Series
Image Source: techblog.comsoc.org

Also, the new Qualcomm chipsets will make a large range of devices, mid-price or expensive, support 5G.Which is kind of the main purpose behind the release of the new chipset, i.e., to make the 5G technology available to almost everyone, not to the ones with expensive devices. “The transition to 5G is going to be faster than earlier transitions. Now we have to bring it to everyone,” said the Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon.

According to the announcement, the company has already partnered with twelve smartphone makers for integrating the new Snapdragon 7 series 5G chipset into their upcoming 5G smartphones. This list of partners includes names like Oppo, Vivo, Nokia, LG, etc.

The announcement by the company did not reveal the actual dates of availability of these new chipsets in the market but has given us the time slot when the markets can have them. Qualcomm has already talked about releasing the 8xx series 5G platform by the end of this year, whereas we can expect the Snapdragon 7xx series 5G platform to roll out by the fourth quarter of this year, and the release of the 6xx series 5G platform may take place in the second quarter of 2020.

Mediatek to Bring a Premium 5G Chip to Empower the Cheaper Next-gen Smartphones

The Taiwan based semiconductor company, MediaTek, has announced a 5G processor at Computex event, currently happening in Taiwan. The company has become the first to be launching a 7nm System-on-a-Chip (SoC) with an integrated 5G modem. In fact, the new chip will also have the company’ newly announced Cortex-A77 cores and new Mali-G77 GPU.

mediatek 5g chipset
Image Source: mediatek.com

The announcement seems to be quite unusual and un-prepared one, as the company did not give any details on the name, price, or its specifications, rather it focussed on how fast the chip is going to be. According to the company, the chip will be able to support 4.7Gbps download as well as 2.5Gbps speeds. It has also got support for Standalone (SA) and Non-Standalone (NSA) 5G infrastructure along with sub-6GHz spectrum.

The SoC is integrated with MediaTek Helio M70 5G modem and provides intelligent power management as well as support for all 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G. It also renders dynamic power sharing to offer the best connectivity. The chipset is also enabled to provide support for camera up to 80MP and is able to encode/decode 4K videos at 60fps.

“Everything about this chip is designed for the first wave of flagship 5G devices. The leading-edge technology in this chipset makes it the most powerful 5G SoC announced to date and puts MediaTek at the forefront of 5G SoC design. MediaTek will power rollouts of 5G premium level devices.” said Joe Chen, the President at MediaTek.

The chipset is going to be its kind and will challenge one of the biggest semiconductor company Qualcomm in the premium smartphone market. Though the latter has been the leader in the chipset manufacturing industry, empowering both modems and processors for computers and mobiles, with the new SoC, MediaTek has become quite confident on the challenging part. It also expects to power the first wave of high-end 5G smartphones to be released in 2020.

According to the company, it will release the samples of the new chipset for its client by Q3 2019, and it may be empowering many commercial 5G smartphones in the first quarter of 2020.

Verizon to Step into 5G Internet Service With its Home Broadband

Verizon 5G
Image Source: verizon.com

Last year, in the November, Verizon had indicated the launch of its 5G home network, by the end of 2018. It has been working on its 5G network for a long time and finally, it has announced its launch to be on October 1st this year. The 5G home is simply concentrated on providing faster wireless network, that will be a huge growth in the mobile technology. The 5G home internet will be available in the American metro cities including Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Sacramento, and will be simply called 5G home.

The world’s first 5G commercial service, 5G home, is currently open for subscriptions and the installation will start on 1st of October this year. The 5G home is going to provide a basic speed of 300 Mbps and can reach 1Gbps, with no data caps, depending upon the locality and the signal range.

The early subscribers will get benefits like free installation, free YouTube and complimentary services for three months, and, also a free Chromecast or Apple TV 4K. The cost for the Verizon’s existing customers for the 5G home will be $50 a month, while the new customers will be charged $70, for their monthly subscription.

The 5G home is not purely a 5G service, but, is claimed to be faster than the 4G and LTE data networks. The 5G home is restricted to only a few cities and is a home broadband network. T-mobile has also announced a better 5G network, in competition with the Verizon 5G service and companies like Sprint and LG, are planning to launch the first 5G smartphones in the coming year.

Huawei & Other Chinese Companies Banned from Australia’s 5G network

Huawei
Image Source: xiaomitoday.com

The national security is a critical issue and the Australian government has given this reason to ban the world’s third largest smartphone company Huawei from its 5G network project. The news of banning Huawei started hitting the headlines in the month of June this year, and finally, on the last Thursday, it was officially imposed on Huawei.

Noticeably, as a result of the friction between the US and China, U.S. had also banned Huawei in its lucrative market over national security concern. Now this time, Australian intelligence agencies have also raised the same matter by saying that Beijing can force the Chinese companies to share sensitive data with them.

According to the reports, Australia’s acting Home Affairs Minister Scott Morrison said that the Government’s priority would “always be the safety and security of Australians”. Another government official stated, “Huawei owns political committees and they have to serve the Chinese intelligence agencies, under the Communist law if requested”.

Huawei Australia has denied all the connection with the political parties and has given an assurance that all the shares of Huawei are owned by its employees and the Chinese Government has nothing to do with its functioning. It also came on to twitter saying, ”This is an extremely disappointing result for consumers. Huawei is a world leader in 5G. Has safely & securely delivered wireless technology in Aust for close to 15 yrs”.

The ban on Huawei is only for Australian 5G network. It is already supplying equipment for the 4g network in Australia and will continue to do so. Along with Huawei, some other Chinese companies are also banned from the Australian 5G network, including ZTE.