Today, Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) followed up yesterday’s Cat9 carrier aggregation interoperability announcement in conjunction with Ericsson with its own Gobi Modem announcement.

Gobi is Qualcomm’s own branding for its modem line of products, separate from its Snapdragon line of products. Gobi Modems are standalone modem products that are generally found in devices that do not have a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip inside or have a Snapdragon applications processor that doesn’t have a modem built-in. This new line of modems, the Gobi 9×45 line of LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) modems follows in the path of the 9×35 family of modems which has yet to even take hold in the market. The MDM9x45 is a successor to the Cat6 MDM9x35 family of 20nm modems from Qualcomm. In fact, the MDM9x35 family of Gobi modems were Qualcomm’s first 20nm products and still are to this day the only 20nm chips Qualcomm has in devices now, until they start shipping Snapdragon 810 and 808 chips in phones in early 2015.

The 9×45 family of Gobi LTE modems are classified as LTE Category 10 modems which are technically classified as LTE-Advanced (LTE-A), which means they are the exact same downlink speed as Category 9 LTE, but with double the uplink speed. This means that if someone were to have a Cat9 modem and got perfect speeds out of it, they would get 450 Mbps download and 50 Mbps upload, a pretty uneven performance number. Now, with Cat10, you are doubling the uplink speed to up to 100 Mbps, meaning that with Cat10 you see no downlink speed increases, but rather a doubling of the uplink speed to up to 100 Mbps. In addition to announcing the new Cat10 9×45 modem, Qualcomm also announced their second generation RF360 envelope tracker, the QFE1300 which is also sampling to customers along with the MDM9x45 modems and should be in devices in 2015.

Much like the Cat9 announcement yesterday, in order to achieve these 450 Mbps speeds, the MDM9x45 modems will need to utilize 60 MHz 3X CA (carrier aggregation) by combining three different 60 MHz bands in order to deliver such blazing speeds. It also requires 40 MHz 2x CA in order to be able to do the 100 Mbps uplink speeds. The QFE3100 is designed for a 30% smaller board area and enhanced power efficiency as compared to the previous generation, as well as allows improved calibration and implementation tools to ease Envelope Tracking design-in for OEMs and accelerate commercial deployment. This new generation of envelope tracker is once again designed to bring down the overall power consumption of the phone when using cellular data when paired with the Qualcomm MDM9x45 modem, much like the QFE1100 when paired with the MDM9x35.

And all of these speeds are fantastic to have, but one of the biggest problems is that even if there is a carrier in the US remotely capable of having three 20 MHz blocks of LTE in a single market, they also have to have the backbone to support anything remotely close to 450 Mbps downloads and 100 Mbps uploads. Right now, the carriers are severely hampering the speed of innovation, much like the ISPs do in the wired world. In fact, most of the current modems shipping in phones like the iPhone 6, LG G3, Sony Xperia Z3, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 4 and many other flagship phones all have modems capable of speeds up to 150 Mbps with CA. Yet, the highest speeds I have ever seen in the US have been 80 Mbps, just slightly over half of the speed that our phones are capable of. And if you were to take most flagship phones around your city and test it virtually any time of day, the fastest you’ll realistically get is around 30-40 Mbps up or down.

So, even though Qualcomm is clearly leading the pack with LTE innovations and LTE-A, the carriers are really limiting the value of Qualcomm’s innovations as now Qualcomm’s competitors can merely come out with Cat4 LTE modems and still achieve similar speeds with minimal effort.

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Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) and Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) have jointly announced that they have successfully tested the world’s first inter-company interoperability between Qualcomm’s Cat9 LTE (Category 9) MSM mobile chipsets and Ericsson’s LTE-A (LTE-Advanced) network infrastructure.

This test was done between the two companies in order to prove that interoperability is already possible on Cat9 hardware from both companies. Since, Qualcomm is both an infrastructure and client chipset company while Ericsson is only infrastructure since the company folded up the ST-Ericsson’s joint venture that produced competing products to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors.

The two companies were able to achieve the Cat9 450 Mbps speeds thanks to carrier aggregation (combining multiple frequencies/bands) that Qualcomm’s chipsets and Ericsson’s infrastructure are both capable of doing. Ericsson actually even tells us which hardware they accomplished this on, their RBS 6000 family of base stations for macro and small cell networks. Which means these are fairly small base stations and fairly short distance connections. Additionally, thanks to Ericsson’s specs of the RBS 6000, we know that Qualcomm and Ericsson used 60 MHz 3x carrier aggregation in order to deliver the Cat9 LTE speeds of 450 Mbps.

Qualcomm, unfortunately, doesn’t tell us which Snapdragon chipset this is that’s running the new 450 Mbps speeds, but they do say that it is a future chipset which could be something coming next year or something 2 or 3 years from now. We simply can’t know. But what we do know is that the carriers are very very unlikely to deliver anything anywhere near these speeds. The unfortunate reality, however, is that right now there are no carriers in the US even technically capable of delivering three 20 MHz different bands of  LTE based on their spectrum allocation. And even if they had the spectrum holdings to enable Cat9 LTE with carrier aggregation, they wouldn’t even have the backend to support it.

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So, last night T-Mobile made a lot of announcements with their new Uncarrier 5 event, that follows their Uncarrier 3.0 and 4.0 which eventually rolled into their Uncarrier 6 strategy as well. So, we can call last night’s event Uncarrier 5-6. Anyways, last night T-Mobile made three big announcements, mostly circled around their network and how they plan to make their network the best in the US at the most reasonable prices of all their competitors.

T-Mobile’s Uncarrier 5.0 Event, Image Credit: The Verge

Let’s talk about one of the most interesting things T-Mobile has announced so far at the event, and that’s their 7 day free test drive of T-Mobile’s network. T-Mobile’s John Legere basically announced that anyone that wants to try T-Mobile out can do so with an iPhone for free for 7 days to see whether or not the network is up to their expectations. And even more importantly, if it is better than what they’re getting with their current carrier. With this strategy, T-Mobile is being brilliant because one of the easiest ways to sell people something is by letting them try it themselves. And the truth is that its very hard to know whether or not you want to switch to a carrier without actually trying it for yourself. By giving people iPhones to try out the network T-Mobile solves this problem and already puts a device in people’s hands that they’ll likely want to keep anyways. This is something that none of the other carriers are doing and brings down the barrier for consumers to test out the network before they commit, which many people worry about when it comes to T-Mobile. T-Mobile was infamous for horrible coverage and nowadays, most of those issues are resolved but some people don’t know that and this is a perfect way for people to test that out.

T-Mobile Test Drive

In addition to the T-Mobile 7 Day Test Drive, they also announced that they would be further accelerating their rollout of VoLTE and the initial roll-out of Wideband LTE which is just 15 MHz+15 MHz carrier aggregation feature that should allow speeds in excess of 100 Mbps. T-Mobile has tested speeds that nearly read 150 Mbps, but unfortunately for my market T-Mobile is limiting users to 40 Mbps, which makes it a bit difficult to use any sort of Wideband features, even if my phone’s cellular modem supports it.  Currently, 16 of T-Mobile’s markets have enough spectrum to be able to support 15 MHz + 15 MHz carrier aggregation and they will rapidly continue to roll this out as they continue to update their network. It is nice to see the carriers finally supporting carrier aggregation as devices like the recently announced Samsung Galaxy S5 LTE-A will make good use of the network’s carrier aggregation features.

The below image is a Speedtest that someone took while at the T-Mobile Uncarrier 5.0 event, Myriam Joire, who was able to test with the network that was available inside the venue. We’ve got permission to use this screenshot so that you guys can see for yourselves exactly what kinds of speeds are possible in the near future or right now depending on where you live (see the list above).

Carrier Aggregation – Image courtesy of @Tnkgrl (Myriam Joire)

There were also a recent set of nationwide speed tests of networks across the country and T-Mobile came in first or second in many of them, including PCMag’s own which found T-Mobile almost on par with Verizon, who charges significantly more and has much less pro-consumer policies. And if you look at the tested speeds below, in the San Diego test you can see that T-Mobile had the best average speeds in all tests which really is what matters most when you talk about network speeds since the average is what you will usually see, as opposed to the top speed or slowest speed. However, in San Diego, T-Mobile is also limiting users to 40 Mbps (as I have been complaining about) and can now confirm that PCMag also had the same experience that I have.

In addition to their accelerated LTE Wideband roll-out, T-Mobile is also rolling out more of their Voice over LTE (VoLTE). T-Mobile is looking to beat their competitors to the punch with their HD voice/VoLTE features that would enable you to have very high quality voice in addition to sharing that signal over your data connection, reducing the amount of radios that have to stay on while a phone is connected to the network. The significantly improved audio will only be available on certain devices, but since T-Mobile announced their VoLTE roll-out they have already launched VoLTE in 15 markets and are expecting to launch nationwide by the end of the year.

In addition to the network improvements and the 7 Day Test Drive, T-Mobile made a pretty significant announcement which they call Uncarrier 6.0 by ‘setting your music free’. Essentially, what T-Mobile is doing is that they are no longer counting music streaming against your monthly data plan if you don’t have an unlimited data plan. The apps that T-Mobile currently will not count towards your monthly data plan usage are: Pandora, Rhapsody, iHeartRadio, iTunes Radio, Slacker, and Spotify. On top of that, T-Mobile will allow users to vote for music streaming apps that aren’t currently included, which will likely add Google Play Music which oddly isn’t included on T-Mobile’s list of ‘approved’ apps. This is a pretty significant move for T-Mobile to make because a lot of people’s data plans get used up quite a bit by music streaming applications, especially Spotify when you use the high quality feature which can chew up a gigabyte a month or more of data on its own.

Overall, all of these developments are welcome ones by consumers, but there are some problems with T-Mobile’s music streaming pertaining to Net Neutrality that we’ll be addressing in another article.

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