Introducing The Snapdragon X50, World's First 5G Modem

During the recently held Qualcomm 4G/5G Summit in Hong Kong, the mobile chip giant has announced its very first 5G modem, the Snapdragon X50.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X50 5G modem is the first and only 5G modem in existence.

According to Forbes, Qualcomm says that the modem is capable of download speeds of up to 5 Gbps which is five times faster than the fastest 4G modem.

The latter also happens to be a Qualcomm modem, the Snapdragon X16.

Qualcomm announced that it will be modifying the X16 in hotspots and SoC.

The Snapdragon X50 will initially support 28 GHz mmWave spectrum initially.

This is a short wave length kind of radio communication that has been associated with 5G, but with very high frequency.

This 28 GHz band of spectrum is designed to support both Verizon's 5GTF and Korea Telecom's 5G-SIG specifications, as reported by Forbes.

In view of this, the Snapdragon X50 will more likely to be seen in both companies' deployments of 5G technology which are reported to be due in 2018.

It was conveyed that in order to attain speeds of up to 5 Gbps, the X50 must be able to do things like adaptive beam-forming and beam tracking for when the device isn't in direct line of sight.

The Snapdragon X50 does 8X carrier aggregation (CA), combining 8 different 100 MHz blocks of mmWave spectrum.

Qualcomm has given a more specific time frame in the availability of the 5G modem.

It was reported that X50-powered devices 'are expected to be available during the first half of 2018', according to Engadget.

Accordingly, the timing of its availability makes sense as the finalized 5G standard should arrive in the same year, and operators like Verizon will certainly be needing test devices soon.

Moreover, the X50 can seamlessly switch between 5G and Gigabit LTE, so long as it's paired with a Snapdragon processor with an integrated Gigabit LTE modem -- like the X16 announced earlier this year.

Having this latest advance technology in internet connection speeds will enable customers to look forward for much more exciting treat in the mobile world, like the real-time augmented reality plus virtual reality, super high quality multimedia content, instantaneous cloud computing applications, and the like.