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Qualcomm announces X20, their latest 1.2Gbps LTE modem ahead of MWC 2017

By Liu Hongzuo - on 22 Feb 2017, 10:56am

Qualcomm announces X20, their latest 1.2Gbps LTE modem ahead of MWC 2017

It’s less than a week to MWC 2017, and Qualcomm decides to announce their Snapdragon X20 – an LTE modem that can provide download speeds of up to 1.2Gbps.

The Snapdragon X20 LTE modem supports up to LTE Cat 18 for downloads, and up to LTE Cat 13 for uploads. This translates to a maximum downlink speed of 1.2Gbps, which is 20% more than what its preceding X16 LTE modem can offer. Uplink speeds, however, remain capped at just 150Mbps.

It was also around this time in 2016 when Qualcomm announced their Snapdragon X16 LTE modem, which touted 1Gbps downlink speeds. According to Qualcomm’s blog post, the X16 will be found in their Snapdragon 835 SoCs – and phones with Snapdragon 835 will be popping up later this year, with the first wave happening at Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, Spain. For comparison, the current Snapdragon 820 flagship processor uses the X12 LTE modem, which has a peak download speed of 600Mbps.

Qualcomm illustrates how 5x carrier aggregation works on their X20 LTE modem.

Qualcomm said that the X20 LTE modem will only surface in the market during the first-half of 2018. It also utilizes License Assisted Access (LAA) technology, enabling the modem to make use of unlicensed spectrum bands in the same fashion as its X16 counterpart. That said, the Snapdragon X20 is manufactured using the 10nm FinFET process, which is a step above X16’s 14nm FinFET process.  You can learn more about the X20's technical specifications from the screenshot below:

Having a high-speed modem in smartphone processors is only half the equation – our local carriers must be able to provide the bandwidth as well. Fortunately, the Big Three and the G have been silently pushing their 5G capabilities forward – you can read about them here. (1), (2), (3), (4).

With that in mind, which Snapdragon 835 smartphone are you looking forward to? :)

Source: Ars Technica, Qualcomm

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