A few weeks back the Qualcomm CEO did his first blog and he chose a big subject, the 5G. There is no doubt that 5G will be coming soon and that it will replace 4G but there has been a lot of claims about which flavour will be the best. Steve Mollenkopf pointed out that 5G is built of blocks based on 3G and 4G, as well as some new frequencies between 1GHz to 6GHz or 28 GHz frequencies known as millimeter-wave.
Foundation of 5G is 4G and 3G
First of all, trials of 5G will start in 2018, so we still have quite some time before we see the first live demos and the first commercial deployment is expected in 2020. Steve Mollenkopf, the Chief Executive Officer of Qualcomm has reminded the world that it actually played a big role in creating 3G. Steve was bold enough to claim that the company invented 3G and of course he is right about that. Back in 2002 when 3G started, we didn’t have an iPhone nor any sort of good functioning touchscreen phone.
This was the era of Blackberry and emails. Back in those days there were not many players who cared about 3G. The maximum speed stopped at a feeble 7.2 Mbps. You only needed to reach 200 kilobits per second (Kbps) to be called 3G. The 3.5G of HSPA got things up to 14 Mbit/s the downlink and 5.76 Mbit/s uplink. The last stop called 3.75G (the little H / H+ that sometimes shows on your phone when you have bad coverage) has got the speed up to 21Mbps or with HSPA+ even to 42 Mbps.
After 3G, came 4G – also known as Long Term Evolution or the LTE. The speed soared from maximal 42 Mbps with substandard 3.75G to 150 Mbps download and 50 Mbps upload. Qualcomm was leading in all of these and it was the first to launch a 4G modem. 
The variation called Carrier Aggregation or CA will let Cat 6. Modems get you to 300 Mbps download and 50 Mbps upload and Cat 12 modems will get your device to 600 Mbps download and 150 Mbps upload.
Qualcomm has demonstrated the Snapdragon X16 LTE modem with 1000 Mbps download and 150 Mbps upload and some want to call these speeds 4G+. This is an easy way to bridge and speed things up before the 5G comes to market. All the breakthrough speeds were first started by Qualcomm and followed by others a year or a few years later. Bear in mind that not all Cat 6 or Cat 12 modems are the same as some might need more power and can deliver slower speeds, but this is something we will leave for another article.
5G should start with 10 Gbps which is much faster than any implemented 4G network in the world. This is 1.25GB a second. It would take 3.76 second to download a 4.7GB DVD with that speed.
Back at Mobile World Congress 2016 we saw a live demo of SK Telecom managing 20Gbps (2.5GB/s using eight data streams on a Nokia network with each capable of 2.5 Gbit per second. The same DVD downloaded in 1.88 seconds. 50GB Blu-ray needs 20 seconds at this speed.
Before we get lost in these incredible speeds, let me remind you of one crucial thing. 5G is not only about getting higher speeds. We have seen people commenting that we don’t need these speeds. Just think about streaming 4K video, 360 video or even VR video or content, this would be an easy way to use as much bandwidth that you could possible get.
The future might bring a Netflix / Amazon Prime charging station that would let you fill your notebook, phone of tablet via 5G or 802.11ad capable device.
Mission critical 5G
5G will also focus on mission critical services that need ultra-low latency, high reliability, high availability and strong security. Two things come to mind, self-driving cars that might need to make a decision in split of a second or a connected pacemaker or Injectable IoT devices we heard about back in 2015. Injectables could heal the body from within and Qualcomm and a few other big players are working on them as we speak. There might be a small robot that will come inside a clotted artery and clean all the cholesterol and help you live longer, and even this is not science fiction anymore, the research is happening right now.
The other thing that needs 5G is the Internet of Things boom where your garden hose, smoke detector or a connected bulb needs an IP address and internet. They don’t need a lot of bandwidth but they need a low cost design with ultra-low energy. A moisture sensor sitting inside your garden or a huge agricultural field only needs to send a few bites every few hours to tell you if you need to water the field or not.
Since 5G is being built on the blocks of 4G and even 3G, guess who has the leading 4G solutions and who has the best chances to dominate? Mollenkopf highlights that "We (Qualcomm) are pioneering 5G technologies today including our work on LTE Unlicensed, Gigabit Class LTE (Snapdragon X16), LTE IoT, WiGig 802.11ad and mobile millimeter-wave radios.” These are the important blocks it seems as 5G will summarise and make good use of all these technologies.
We are not ready to pick the winner but you can clearly say that one has better chances than everyone else combined. Intel doesn’t think so as Intel’s Chief Financial Officer CFO Stacy Smith admitted to Bloomberg that Intel can move from “faster follower in 3G, LTE to a leader in 5G”. This is not as simple as Stacy makes it sound. Intel used to tell us that it will dominate in mobile SoC and they announced that they are exiting this business after billions of losses.
