The demise of wireline connections has been widely predicted and some consumers no longer have fixed lines. As I sit in my office in the countryside my broadband delivers 5Mbps down stream but only 0.3Mbps upstream; this is better than many nearby who only get 0.5Mbps downstream. My phone connects to 4G and already delivers twice the bandwidth (10Mbps downstream). This is an indication of what is to come with Qualcomm’s announcement of a Cat 16 LTE modem chipset designed to deliver download speeds of up to 1 Gbps. See Qualcomm Announces Mobile Industry’s First Gigabit Class LTE Modem.
The Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ X16 LTE modem is the first commercially announced LTE Advanced Pro modem and enables data bandwidths that are competitive with most FTTx wireline offerings. It supports advanced carrier aggregation, high order MIMO configurations and LTE over unlicensed spectrum. Initial applications will be high end smart smartphones, tablets, and mobile computing devices. This modem will be integrated into future application processors making this bandwidth available on mainstream phones.
The key challenge for mobile service providers to capitalize on this opportunity is to provide the necessary network capacity. My broadband provides 200GB per month. The maximum I can currently get though my mobile service provider is 12GB per month.