While 75 percent of the world is surfing the Internet at speeds of less then 5Mbps, Qualcomm’s new modem chip can offer download speeds of upto 1Gbps.
Most modern smartphones with top end chips offer maximum speeds of 300Mbps or 450Mbps. The new Snapdragon X16 modem offers what are known as Category 16 LTE download speeds which are up to 1Gbps. The new chip will also let you upload at speeds of up to 150Mbps. However, the sad part is that there are few service providers who can provide users with that speed.
The new X16 chip differs in working from its predecessors, instead of using extra chunks of spectrum to send data faster, X16 makes better use of what’s available to it. It does that by using some fancy signal processing to squeeze more streams of data into the same old 20 MHz slices of spectrum your current phone makes use of. You can read more about the details in Qualcomm’s release.
As said above, a very few LTE networks would provide anywhere near 1Gbps speeds just yet, so it’s an investment in the future, rather than the present.
