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Qualcomm testing new LTE on Snapdragon 810

by on24 December 2014


LTE Category 9 Carrier Aggregation testing on EE

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 will end up in most of high-end phones next year and along with its eight 64-bit cores it has a quite powerful modem too. The new modem supports Category 9 Carrier Aggregation and peaks speeds of 410 Mbits over three 20MHz LTE carriers.

Modems are quite unique devices and so far Qualcomm is the king of the market, especially when it comes to integration of top notch modems on powerful SoCs. It turns out that Huawei has the infrastructure to support the new LTE-A '4G+' network, which is a fancy name for LTE Category 9 Carrier Aggregation implemented in Snapdragon 810 modem.

Category 9 Carrier Aggregation allows EE to aggregate 20MHz of 1800MHz spectrum with another 20MHz of 2.6GHz, and a third carrier of 15MHz of 2.6GHz.

"Transitioning from Category 6 to Category 9 LTE-A connectivity will mean 1.5x faster peak download speeds, swift application response times, reliable connectivity and connections to the fastest networks." said Enrico Salvatori, senior vice president and president of Qualcomm Europe.

We expect to see many phones based on the 20nm Snapdragon 810 SoC, including the latest phones from Samsung, HTC and LG as well as the other players. Many of these announcements will take place at the Mobile World Congress in early March 2015 and we expect to see the phones in retail later that month or in early April.

Luckily there is some competition in the LTE space, especially thanks to MediaTek that has a nice eight core 64-bit processor with LTE Cat 4 support and we are sure that in 2015 MediaTek will introduce additional designs to put some pressure on Qualcomm, at least in the mainstream market. Mediatek already took huge chunks of the Chinese market and is expanding to other markets as we speak.

 

Last modified on 29 December 2014
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