Samsung and Qualcomm want to take 5G speed to another level. What technology is it about?

Samsung and Qualcomm recently announced promising test results with the advanced 1024 QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) technology, showing a more than 20% increase in download speeds in 5G networks.

These tests, carried out in Samsung’s laboratories in South Korea, show the enormous technological potential for the future of telecommunications.

1024 QAM technology allows for the transmission of a higher number of bits per signal wave compared to 256 QAM, which is currently the standard in commercial networks. This helps increase efficiency in the use of the frequency spectrum, which is vital for applications that require a lot of bandwidth, such as live video streaming or online gaming, Samsung says.

What equipment did the tech giants use?

The experiments used state-of-the-art equipment, including Samsung’s vRAN 5G software and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X75 5G modem, to test performance in the Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) and Time Division Duplex (TDD) spectrum bands at the frequencies of 2 ,1 GHz and 3.5 GHz. Using a bandwidth of 20 MHz on the FDD band, an impressive speed of 485 Mbps was achieved, demonstrating an improvement of over 20% over 256 QAM technology.

The test is the first use of 1024 QAM for the FDD band in the industry and is considered a major step forward in the evolution of 5G networks. Samsung plans to continue testing this technology in traditional RAN and expects it to be commercially available later this year.

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