A new Ookla study shows Qualcomm has the fastest 5G chipsets in the UK and US for the first half of 2020

The choice of 5G-capable chipsets or chipsets/modems available to smartphone OEMs is slowly but steadily growing. Nevertheless, they still tend to come from 3 main players in this market: Qualcomm (the makers of Snapdragon SoCs); MediaTek (responsible for the fast-emerging Dimensity series) and Huawei (whose small sub-section of Kirin 5Gs may be in jeopardy of petering out in the near future).

Ookla, the makers of a prominent data speed-testing mobile app, has reportedly released its findings on 5G download speeds in the US and UK over 1 and 2Q2020. It concluded that the then-latest flagship Snapdragon platforms were the fastest 5G-related processors in these 2 markets. In terms of the US, the 855+ was found to be an average of 67% faster on 2G to 5G compared to "the next fastest competitor".

This market's fastest phones were found to include the Motorola Edge+; the OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro; the LG V60 ThinQ and the 5G variants of all the Samsung Galaxy S20-series phones (the S20, Plus and Ultra, specifically) for the time-frame studied. In the UK, however, this title went to the OnePlus 7 Pro 5G.

That phone was linked to "double-digit" gains for its 855+ platform compared to the nearest chipset and modem from MediaTek. However, this was slightly meaningless, as phones based on the latter were not available in the UK at the time. Nevertheless, Ookla reported that 4G/LTE Snapdragon-based devices were an average of 44% faster compared to those with silicon from the Taiwanese company.