Qualcomm Connectivity Workshop showcases the future of wireless [VIDEO]

We recently held a Connectivity Workshop in New York City to talk about the important ways that new developments in technology are fundamentally changing what’s possible over wireless.

There were live demonstrations of the advanced capabilities of Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ processors and Qualcomm® Gobi™ modems, and speeches given by a number of industry analysts and leaders.

The speakers were Raj Talluri, Vice President of Product Management at Qualcomm, Mike Roberts, Practice Leader at Ovum, Parissa Pandkhou, Director of Multicast Product Development at Verizon, John Peddie, of John Peddie Research, and Peter Carson, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Qualcomm.

While each speaker brought their own expert perspective and examples to the table, the overall theme was that meeting user demand for wireless connectivity will require the coming together of several advancements in unicast, broadcast, and Wi-Fi technologies.

That’s because as the number of worldwide connections grows—whether these are mobile subscriptions or machine-to-machine connections in the Internet of Everything—our wireless networks and mobile devices will need to evolve. Anybody who has tried to use their smartphone to search the web while at a crowded event will have a clear picture of why this is true.

Some of the new technologies built in to Gobi modems and Snapdragon processors are designed precisely to address these issues. A few were highlighted with product demonstrations at the event. One was an example of gigabit Wi-Fi in which a tablet device wirelessly streamed 4K video to a large display at rates greater than 4 Gbps over WiGig, which uses the 60 GHz frequency band.

The first public live demonstration of 3x carrier aggregation using a Snapdragon 810 processor showed live 4K streaming using the flexibility afforded by three downlink LTE carriers. A separate VoLTE/3G/Wi-Fi service continuity demo highlighted a seamless user experience while moving across various radio access technologies.

In another demo, multiple devices received the same content stream with LTE Broadcast at once, without added degradation as the load increased. There were additional throughput and power benchmarking demos which showed superior Gobi modem performance compared to the competition. Cat6 and Cat4 (both FDD and TDD) throughput benchmarking showed how Gobi modems were better able to sustain the high data rates required for 4K streaming, while Cat4 power benchmarking revealed a significantly lower power consumption (up to 40% advantage) for Gobi modems in Cat4 TDD. 

The fact is that bandwidth is a limited resource. A lot of companies are working very hard to harness additional spectrum and find new ways to manage and provide access to users. Just consider the success of 4G LTE. Now, from WiGig to LTE Advanced Carrier Aggregation, there are promising solutions on the horizon.