Global 5G MmWave Adoption ‘Will Get Traction’: Qualcomm CEO

All 5G smartphones for 2022 using Qualcomm chips will be based on the 3rd Generation Partnership Project’s Release 16 spec, Qualcomm Technologies Chief Technology Officer James Thompson told the company’s investor day event Tuesday. Standards work on Release 17 is “pretty much baked,” and products based on that spec will be available commercially in about two years, he said. “Lots and lots of features associated with smartphones” are contained in releases 16 and 17, including “enhancements” for mobility, signal coverage and network capacity, he said. “We are a company that supports the entire world” on 5G, said Thompson. “5G is not the same everywhere,” he said. “There are about 10,000 different band combinations that we have to design for.” About 180 network operators have launched 5G, he said. “Everybody’s got a little bit different bands. They’ve got different infrastructure providers. Their feature sets are different, so there are a lot of idiosyncracies associated with the global nature of mobile.” In handsets, Qualcomm is “very focused on the opportunity available to us in the market right now,” said CEO Cristiano Amon. “Android is one of the fastest-growing revenue and margin-expansion opportunities for us in handsets.” Snapdragon is “the platform of choice in premium and high-tier Android smartphones,” he said. The company is bullish about global millimeter-wave adoption for 5G, said Amon. MmWave is deployed in the U.S. and Japan and is coming soon to South Korea, he said. “We remain optimistic” about mmWave’s deployment in China, he said. “If mmWave gets traction, and it will get traction and it will expand, it’s an incredible upside opportunity for our RF front-end business.”