Qualcomm claims to have passed an important milestone with its mmWave 5G technology

Qualcomm persists in asserting that standalone (SA) mmWave, a sub-type of 5G, is "poised to unlock new capabilities for consumers and enterprises thanks to faster speeds, lower latency and deployment flexibility". However, it still tends to require a number of crutches to work, such as a fall-back on sub-6GHz 5G or even 4G/LTE (i.e. non-standalone (NSA) mmWave 5G).

Nevertheless, Qualcomm now claims that SA mmWave 5G has completed a new test of its commercial use in the Chinese market all on its own (or in FR2-only form). It was done using "devices powered by the Snapdragon X65 5G Modem-RF System" connected over infrastructure provided by the OEM's partners in this endeavor, Nokia Shanghai Bell, CICT Mobile and ZTE.

Qualcomm reported peak download rates of approximately 7.1Gb/s and peak upload rates of about 2.1Gb/s, with a latency of 3.6 milliseconds (ms). The company asserts that the tests also showed that the FR2-only set-up beat sub-6 GHz in both respects (although no comparative figures were released).

Then again, some other variables, such as the distance between the devices in question, or their distance from the rest of the equipment, involved in this project, went unmentioned. Nevertheless, Durga Malladi, a senior vice president and general manager at Qualcomm Technologies, chalked its results up as "another significant milestone for 5G mmWave".

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